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-

1. You can configure as many late fees as you want
2. 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-

1. Name: Unique name to identify the late fee, e.g. “2-percent-weekly”, “10-dollar-monthly” etc.
2. Type: Should it be calculated as a “% of the invoice” or is it going to be a “flat fee”.
3. Rate: Specify a flat fee or a percentage, based on what you have specified for the “Type” field.
4. 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-

1. Go to the “Customers” tab.
2. Click on the “Statement of Account” icon in the “Actions” column of the customer for whom you want to generate the statement.
3. 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 –

1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. Now, click on the “Import from Blinksale” link at the left under the “Import & Export Settings”
3. 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-

1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. In the settings page that comes up, click on the “Payment Gateways” link under “Invoice Settings” on the left.
3. 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-

1. Sign-in to your Google Checkout account and go to settings.
2. Click on the “Integration” link on the left.
3. 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

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-

1. Click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. Click on the “Currency & Time” link on the left, this will take you to the currency and time zone configuration page.
3. In the currency and time zone configuration page, you have the “Currency Details” table, where you can add as many currencies as you want and for each currency you can specify a unique symbol.
4. In the same table you can also specify the format for the currencies and select the currency that has to be used as your base currency (the currency, in which you do all your accounting).

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!