Currency decimal places - It's configurable!
Prior to the upgrade, irrespective of the currency in which you operate the amounts were rounded to two decimal places. This doesn't go well with customers in a few countries. Let me give you an example of Japanese Yen (JPY) that does not have decimal places. Previously, when you raise an invoice totaling 100 Yen, the amount would appear as 100.00 in the invoice. Japanese customers tend to confuse 100.00 with 10000 Yen.
With this upgrade, you can configure the decimal places for JPY to 0 so that the .00 after 100 would no longer rear its ugly head. I am sure our friends in Japan will like this feature. We also hope our beloved customers in the Middle East and elsewhere who operate in currencies with 3 decimals will benefit.
Quantity Decimal Places - Precision Personified
Zoho Invoice now supports six decimals places for quantity on an invoice. All amounts in the invoice will be formatted to display up to the decimal places you have specified. If you are a telecommunication company who calculates customer calls in minutes to the 4th decimal or any other business not happy with the restriction of 2 decimals, you can try out Zoho Invoice now - the quantity decimal places should no longer be a deal breaker. With this, your invoices should look more accurate and better.
Invoice Creation - Service/Item Prices in Foreign Currency
We have also made changes to the way the item prices are shown while creating/editing invoices in foreign currency. Henceforth, if the invoice currency is different from your base currency item prices will be displayed in the invoice currency even while creating/editing the invoice. Previously, while creating invoices the item price were shown in base currency even though while viewing or sending the invoice they get converted to the invoice(foreign) currency. The amounts in invoice currency are calculated based on the exchange rate that you enter.
This upgrade lays the foundation for more exciting things to come from Zoho Invoice. We are in the midst of a hot Indian summer and one way to beat the heat is by delivering some cool stuff for our customers. Stay tuned.


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We are happy to announce support
for Authorize.net in Zoho
Invoice. Now you can accept online payments from your customers via Authorize.net in Zoho Invoice. Clearly this has been one of the
most requested features and we are happy to heed to the request. This integration gives you more options, now you can accept online payments via any of these payment gateways - PayPal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net |
| Authorize.net is one of the most popular payment gateways; it can help you accept credit card payments quickly and more affordably. You can get details about it from the following link - how it works |
| Configuring Authorize.net in Zoho Invoice: Please follow the steps below, to configure Authorize.net in Zoho Invoice- 1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right. 2. In the settings page, click on
the “Payment Gateways”
link under “Invoice Settings”. 3. Enter your "API LoginID" and "Transaction Key" in the respective fields. 4. Click on "Save". |
Configuring Invoice notification mail: After configuring the API LoginID it is necessary to configure your invoice notification mail. Please follow the steps below, 1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right. 2. In the settings page, click on the “Invoice notification” link under “E-mail Settings”. 3. Please add the placeholder %Authorize.Net%. 4. Click on "Save". |
Stay tuned for more..... |
In an ideal world, all your customers pay you on time. In the real world, however, you need a mechanism to encourage your defaulting customers to pay you on time. One best, proven mechanism to ensure timely payment is - charging late fees on invoices. More often than not, the complexities involved in computing and managing the late fees keeps you away from using it.
Well, that’s no more the case! With Zoho Invoice late fee calculation on invoices can be completely automated and managing it is a breeze. Let’s quickly see how to configure late fees for an invoice, but before getting into the configuration details, let’s take a look at their relationship-
Late fees configuration:
Configuring late fees is simple and it just has the following four fields-
Associating late fees to an invoice:
While creating or editing an invoice, just select the appropriate late fee in the “Late Fees” field as shown below-
Hope you find this feature useful and it comes handy whenever your customers delay their payments for your invoices. Try it now and share your comments with us.
Do you spend more time following up customers for payments? Do you have customers who have disputed an invoice or payment? Have you frantically tried to consolidate the transactions for a particular customer?
If the answer to any of the above question is yes, you would have definitely felt the need for customer transaction summary (customer statements). Not surprisingly this is one of the most requested features in Zoho Invoice and we are happy to heed to the request. Yes, we have added support for “Customer Statements” in Zoho Invoice.
What is a customer statement?
Customer statement is a summary of all transactions for a particular customer during a specific period. It lists the invoices that were sent and the payments that were received along with their associated details. Shown below is a sample customer statement-
How to generate a customer statement?
Generating a customer statement in Zoho Invoice is very easy-
You also have the option to generate the statement from customer’s detail page and from the “Balances report” under “Customer Reports” in the “Reports” tab.
Give this feature a try and feel free to share your comments with us.
We have been getting quite a few requests from our customers as to how they can import data from their Blinksale account to Zoho Invoice. Earlier we used to send manual procedures and assist customers individually but still it was not easy for our customers to import the data.
Now with the last upgrade, we have made this import lot easier. Here is how you can import your data from Blinksale to Zoho Invoice –
All your invoices and customers along with their associated details will be imported into Zoho Invoice.
We also recommend you to take a look at the following wiki doc – “Importing data from Blinksale” in which we have listed out the known issues.
After moving to Zoho Invoice, if I want to switch to some other invoicing service how easy or difficult will it be?
We sincerely hope you won’t do that :) Anyway it is your choice.
You can export data out of Zoho Invoice anytime you want. All you have to do is export the data from Zoho Invoice, change it to the format supported by that particular service and import it into that service. We have a pretty comprehensive set of options to export your data. We help exporting the data in CSV, TSV, XLS, JSON and other standard formats. For further details you can refer the blog post that I made on importing and exporting options in Zoho Invoice.
What Next?
We are also working on our APIs and we will be releasing them shortly. APIs will definitely add to the list of import/export options and will make the job of importing/exporting data lot easier.
Give this a try and share your comments.
Regards
Siva
Happy to announce the availability of one of the most requested and long awaited features in Zoho Invoice – “Google Checkout Integration”
Yes, we have integrated our service with Google Checkout. We have already integrated our service with PayPal and now this integration gives more options to our customers. Now they have the option to choose either PayPal or Google Checkout for accepting online payment from their customers.
Configuring Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice:
Configuring Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice is easy and can be done by following the steps below-
Updating the invoice balances:
When your customers pay you online via Google Checkout, we can automatically update your invoice balances. For us to do this automatic update, you will have to do the following-
Getting notified when customers pay you online:
Over and above updating the invoice balances, we can also notify you when your customers pay you online. Just select the “Notify me on online payments” option in the payment gateway settings page to receive the notification.
Sending payment thank-you to customers:
We can also send payment acknowledgement mails to your customers when they pay you online. Just select the “Send acknowledgement to customers” option in the payment gateway settings page to send the thank-you mails.
What next?
We definitely have plans to add support for more payment gateways. If you want us to add support for any specific payment gateway, let us know. Based on the number of requests, we can prioritize and add support for it.
You can try out this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now. We would definitely like to hear your comments and don’t forget to drop us a note when you enjoy using this feature.
Regards
Siva
In the past few weeks we had been really busy adding some nice little features to our service. One such feature is the support for currency symbols. Now you can have your currency symbols ($, €, £, ¥) on your invoices instead of the standard currency code (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY...).
As you may know, we already support multi-currency in our service. Now you can configure a unique symbol for each and every currency that you use. You can configure this in “Currency & Time” settings.
To configure your currency symbol, follow the steps below-
Hope this makes your invoices look much more professional. Give it a try and share your comments.
Happy Invoicing!
Siva
In an article titled 'Let Zoho Send the Bill', Richard Morochove @ PC World offers a good review of Zoho Invoice. Excerpts :
The free edition of Zoho Invoice limits you to 5 invoices per month. Yet even the high-end plan, which offers sufficient capacity for most small businesses, costs a relatively modest $35 per month.
Despite its low cost, Zoho offers enough flexibility in invoice forms and sales reporting to suit the billing needs of almost any small business. If you don't require a complete integrated accounting program, but want to automate your sales invoicing and collections, Zoho Invoice could offer just the right mix of services for you.
I particularly liked the selection of estimate and invoice templates designed for selling services or products, or to collect fixed price amounts, which are generally used for recurring bills. You may also design your own custom template, with sales tax rates you define.
You can opt to skip most of the configuration steps until you create your first invoice. Zoho lets you select most invoicing options on the fly, as you create the bill.
Invoice lets you decide how to follow up on unpaid bills. You may select up to three e-mail reminders and determine how many days after the payment due date they should be sent. You may also change the default reminder message text.
Zoho Invoice is particularly well suited for exporters, since it supports multiple currencies.
Thanks to Richard & PC World!