Zoho Invoice | Zoho Blogs

In the last post for Zoho Gadgets, we promised having gadgets for the Zoho business apps. First in line is Zoho Invoice. Zoho Invoice is now available as a gadget and this can be embedded wherever you want - Zoho Business' Dashboard, iGoogle, Facebook, Orkut, any Open Social XML compatible site or any web app/page where you can embed an iframe.

You can view a list of your latest invoices and estimates. You can add new invoices too.

You can view an invoice in detail. Also possible is editing, printing and seeing the invoice as pdf.

The Zoho Invoice gadget embedded in an iGoogle page

The Zoho Invoice gadget as part of the Zoho Business Desktop (Dashboard)

Hope you like this new Zoho Invoice gadget. Try it out. More importantly, do let us know what more functionality you would like to see in this gadget.

As you may know, we have been focusing a lot on integration between Zoho applications. For a end user, it is important that Zoho applications fit well into his workflow and integrate well with third party applications/services as well. Apart from integrating Zoho applications, we have also integrated Zoho with many third-party applications. Infact, we have too many such integrations. So I'll split this into multiple posts and expand on some of our integrations with non-zoho applications

Integration with Google/Yahoo

Let us start with login. We don't mandate you create an account with Zoho to try our apps. If you are reading this, you probably have a Yahoo or a Google account, right? So we figured, we'll just let you login to Zoho with you existing accounts. This way, you don't have an additional username/password pair to remember.

EchoSign Integration in Zoho Writer

If you are working on an agreement or any other document and you need to get it signed/approved, EchoSign is a great service to use for electronic signatures/approvals. To make the process seamless, we integrated EchoSign into Zoho Writer. So you work on a document and with a click or two, you can send the document for approval. You'll find EchoSign integrated as 'DigiSign' option under the 'Share' MenuTab in Zoho Writer.

Flickr & Picasa Integration in Zoho Show

When you try to insert an image in Zoho Show, apart from uploading the photos, you'll notice two options - Flickr & Picasa. If you already have your images uploaded in other sites, why re-upload them to Zoho. So we integrated Flickr & Picasa into Zoho Show to let your embed those images into your presentations.

Paypal, Google Checkout & Authorize.net integration with Zoho Invoice

Sending out invoices is just one part of the story. If you want to receive payments, your invoicing system needs to have multiple options for your customer to choose. Zoho Invoice integrated multiple payment gateways to receive payments - Paypal, Google Checkout and Authorize.Net.

Integration with multiple IM Networks in Zoho Chat

With Zoho Chat 2.0, we added multi-protocol chat support. This lets you chat with users from other IM Networks including Yahoo!, Google, MSN, AIM, ICQ or any network that supports the Jabber protocol. As Zoho Chat is integrated across mutliple Zoho Apps, you'll be able to chat with members from other IM Networks no matter which Zoho App you are in.

There are just a few examples of external services integrated into Zoho Apps. I'll talk about other integrations in follow-up posts. Meanwhile, if are there any third-party integrations you wish to see in Zoho, please let us know.

When we launched Zoho Invoice last year it was one of the few affordable online invoicing services to support multiple currencies. However, there were some limitations and we have been pleasantly surprised by the number of users seeking improvements. This upgrade addresses these limitations to a large extent. So let's quickly get down to the details:

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.

We are happy to announce support for customer credit feature in Zoho Invoice. Now it is possible to add credits to your customers. You can make use of these credits while applying payments to invoice. You have the option to use the complete credit or a part of it.

Some scenarios in which you will be making use of customer credit:

When customer over pays an invoice and asks you to adjust the excess amount on future invoices.
When customer makes advance payments to goods/services.
When customer orders goods/services, makes payment and later due to some reason returns or cancels the complete order or part of it.

Well, in most of the above cases the best approach will be to increase the customer’s credit via Credit Note. Currently we don’t support raising Credit Notes, we are working on this and will be supporting it shortly. Till such time you can add customer credit directly.

How to add credit to your customer:

Login to Zoho Invoice.
Click on "Customers" tab.
Click on a "Customer Name" to drill down to customer details page.
Click on "Add Credit" link under "Customer Details".
Enter "Amount " and add "Description".
Click on "Save Payment" button.

How to use credits while applying payments:

Login to Zoho Invoice.
Click on "Invoices" tab.
Choose the invoice and click on the "Add Payment" link of that particular invoice.
Click on "Apply From Credit" and leave a check mark on it (Please note that the payment mode will automatically change to "Credit").
Enter value on the "Amount" field.
Click on "Save Payment" button.

Hope you find this feature useful and it comes handy whenever you need to add credit to your customer. Please try this feature and share your comments with us.

Happy Invoicing!!!

We are happy to announce support for voiding invoices in our service. Till date the only way to exclude an invoice from reports is by deleting it, now instead of deleting the invoice you can just mark it as void, voided invoices will be automatically excluded from all the reports. You can keep such voided invoice for your future reference.

Deleting Vs Voiding

When you delete an invoice, the record will be erased out of the system and you may not have it for your future reference. Also your invoicing sequence will get disturbed.

On the other hand when you mark the invoice as void, it will *NOT BE* removed from the system but will be automatically excluded from all reports. Also the invoicing sequence will not be disturbed.

Need for void invoice

There are several occasions when you would like to void an invoice, probably due to the following reasons-

Let’s say your customer had placed an order and you had raised an invoice for it. Later for some reason he/she decides to cancel the order and haven’t yet paid for it. Now you have to remove the invoice, instead of deleting the invoice you can mark it as void and keep it for your future reference.
Voiding will be of immense help during audits as in this case records are not removed and can be readily referred to.
Voiding can also come handy in cases where you have to make lot of changes in the invoice. Instead of making changes on the invoice, you can mark it as void and proceed to create a new invoice. Here you can very well maintain a reference between your old and new invoices.
When you want to keep track of all invoices that you have issued, maintain a sequence and don’t want the sequence to be disturbed by deleting an invoice in-between.
Voiding and maintaining the void invoices will help you track down customers who make too many cancels.

How to void an invoice :

1. Login to Zoho Invoice.
2. Click on "Invoices" tab.
3. Click on the specific "Invoice #" to drill down to the invoice details page.
4. Click on "Void".

How to view void invoices :

1. Login to Zoho Invoice.
2. Click on "Invoices" tab.
3. Click on "Void Invoices" under "Invoices" on the left side panel.

Note: You will not be able to edit or add payments to a voided invoice. However if you wish you can bring it back to life by clicking on "Convert to Draft" link in its details page, after which it will follow the usual "Invoice life cycle".

Hope you find this feature useful and it comes handy whenever you need to void an invoice. Please try this feature and share your comments with us.

Happy Invoicing!!!

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".

More information on API LoginID and Transaction Key can be found at Authorize.net

Authorize.net Payment gateway with zoho Invoice.

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".

Additional options to use with Authorize.net:

You have the choice to receive notifications when a payment is made to you, just select the option "Notify me on online payments" and click on "Save".

If you want to send an acknowledgment to your customer, just select the option "Send acknowledgment to customers” and click on "Save".

Please note that Authorize.net currently supports payments only in US dollars.

What next?

Currently we don't support "Automated Recurring Billing" and electronic check payments feature in authorize.net, we will be supporting it shortly.

Also we are planning 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.

Feel free to explore our other supported payment gateways PayPal and Go ogle Checkout. We would definitely like to hear your comments and don’t forget to drop us a note when you enjoy using this feature.
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-

You can configure as many late fees as you want
While creating/editing an invoice you can associate a late fee to it. Whenever there is a delayed payment for this particular invoice the corresponding late fee formula will be applied.

Late fees configuration:

Configuring late fees is simple and it just has the following four fields-

Name: Unique name to identify the late fee, e.g. “2-percent-weekly”, “10-dollar-monthly” etc.
Type: Should it be calculated as a “% of the invoice” or is it going to be a “flat fee”.
Rate: Specify a flat fee or a percentage, based on what you have specified for the “Type” field.
Apply: The frequency, as to how often the late fee has to be calculated and applied to the invoices.

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-

Go to the “Customers” tab.
Click on the “Statement of Account” icon in the “Actions” column of the customer for whom you want to generate the statement.
Statement will be generated for the current month and you will be taken to the “Customer Statement” page where you have options to change the statement period, export (as PDF), print and e-mail the statement.

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 –

Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
Now, click on the “Import from Blinksale” link at the left under the “Import & Export Settings”
Fill in the requested details and click on the “Import” button

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-

Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
In the settings page that comes up, click on the “Payment Gateways” link under “Invoice Settings” on the left.
Specify your “Merchant ID” and “Merchant Key” and click on the save button.

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-

Sign-in to your Google Checkout account and go to settings.
Click on the “Integration” link on the left.
Now set the “API callback URL” to “https://invoice.zoho.com/gnh.ma”

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

New Gadget for Zoho Invoice

Integration between Zoho & External Apps: Part I

Multi-Currency Enhancements in Zoho Invoice

Customer credits in Zoho Invoice

Void Invoice

Zoho Invoice now supports Authorize.net

Automatically assess the late fees for your invoices

Support for customer statements in Zoho Invoice

Importing data from Blinksale to Zoho Invoice

Support for Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice