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

Our goal is to make invoicing fast, easy and painless for our customers. When we say invoicing, we include the entire process of creating, sending, tracking and managing the invoices. More often than not, tracking and following-up for payments takes a lot of time and energy than the other activities. We clearly understand this. So, here we are in line with our goal introducing a brand new feature “Automatic Payment Reminders” which we hope will definitely help reduce your pain points.

Yes, now you can automate the process of sending payment reminders to your customers. We have tried to make this feature as flexible as possible (at least that is what we think :~))

1. You can specify when each of these reminders has to be sent. Say for example you can configure that the first reminder has to be sent 2 days after the invoice due date, the second one 14 days after the due date and the third one 21 days after the due date.
2. You have full control over the content of each of these reminders, still better you can make use of the placeholders in the content.
3. You also have complete control over who has to be notified via each of these reminders. You can send it to yourself or send it to your customers directly and have yourself copied.

Configuring these automatic payment reminders is simple,

1. Click on the “Settings” link and select the “Payment Reminders” link under “Invoice Settings”.
2. In the “Payment Reminder” page that comes up each of these reminders can be configured by clicking on the appropriate row in the table.

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.

Happy Invoicing
Siva