So I’m the new kid on the team. Just joined last week as the new product manager for Billing Manager. I have to admit…I couldn’t be more excited. My job description is to ‘Help new small businesses succeed.’  It can’t get much better than that.

 And why, you may wonder, is that so appealing?  (And if you weren’t wondering, I still implore you to keep reading, this won’t take long).

 A while back I started a small business. It was computer service for the technically un-savey. Things went well for about a year and I really enjoyed it. I worked hard and the team helped a lot of customers fix their computers. But at the end of the day, the company just wasn’t pulling in the money. We had to shut it down.

 Retrospectively, I learned a lot. The operations weren’t built to scale, my larger customers were taking too much time away from the bread and butter business, the people I hired were good, not great. There’s probably 10 other reasons why we failed that I didn’t mention. Maybe 20.   Starting a business is hard stuff.  There isn’t a manual to help you do it.  YOU get to write the manual every day.  Which is admittedly a fun and exciting challenge!  But it’s not easy.  

 Which brings us back to my current job description. ‘Help new small businesses succeed.’

  As the product manager for Billing Manager, I’m not just here to ensure this is the easiest invoicing solution out there (although that is a goal!). At the end of this day, the team is  here and Billing Manager exists to help make your business succeed.  

 In light of that vision, we’ll start sharing some ‘help my business succeed’ tips here on the blog.  These will be bitesize pieces of knowledge that will hopefully be not only useful but also motivating.

 Feel free to suggest and share your bitesize tips and tricks for others in the comments of any post! Looking forward to hearing from you.

Bermster
Twitter: @freeinvoicing

—–

First Bitesize bit: Business plans are sometimes most useful for the purpose of clarifying your vision. You can be the primary consumer of your business plan, not the investor.  It’s just like shooting a free throw, you want to visualize making the basket before the ball is out of your hands. Business plans are just a visualization of you making the shot. Start visualizing.

http://community.intuit.com/library/articles/elements_business_plan

Attention all users…we’re having a contest!  From all of our interactions with you, we know that you are all highly creative and innovative people, and we here on the Billing Manager team have been thinking of ways to bring it out throughout the product.  Well, one thing that Billing Manager has always been lacking is an awesome logo.  We want the logo to represent all of the extraordinary and dedicated users who use Billing Manager; so what better way than to have you guys design it yourself!?

So, we’re having a contest on who can design the best Billing Manager logo.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to be an artist or a designer to enter, just be creative, give it some meaning, and if you’ve got any semblance of an idea, go for it!  The winner of the contest will have their logo used for anything Billing Manager (e.g. marketing, ads, tshirts, etc), and your company will be featured on the Billing Manager blog. Talk about publicity!  Here are the details:

• Objective: To create a logo for Billing Manager that represents Billing Manager and its users.

• Logo Guidelines: The logo should contain the phrase “Billing Manager” and somehow portray the qualities that you think Billing Manager and Intuit represent.  For example, something like: easy, innovative, quality, real, honest, committed, smart or spirited.

• Prize: Your logo will become the symbol for Billing Manager and you will receive your own spot on our blog to feature your company.

• Submissions: Email us your logo design and a brief explanation of the logo to info@billingmanager.com.  Title the email ‘Billing Manager Logo Design Contest’.  The logo itself can be hand-drawn, a photoshop image, or any form of media, but in the end must be in a proper image file format (.jpeg, .gif, .png, etc) attached to the email.

• Rules: All entries must be received by December 11^th and will become property of Intuit.
  

The team is excited to see what you’ve got!  Good luck!

(Brian Tran is a software engineer on the Billing Manager team.  He hopes to one day own a restaurant called Bubbo’s, serving different kinds of comfort food from around the world.)

Update (9:32AM 9/18/2009): We’ve fixed the performance issue and Billing Manager should be running as normal.  This means you should be having no trouble logging into your account and should be able to process your invoicing and payments like you have always done before.  Our team will also be introducing some improvements that we expect will make Billing Manager run even faster.  Our team is watching this issue very closely but if you have a concern or problem, let us know.

9/10: Billing Manager is currently having some performance issues and is running very slow in some key areas.  We know how many people rely on Billing Manager to invoice their clients and accept payments, so this is a serious problem.  Our team has been investigating the root cause of this issue, I am confident they will get to a solution soon.  Thanks for bearing with us and we will give you an update when we have more information.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and will get Billing Manager running smoothly as soon as possible.

We are currently investigating fraudulent emails that were sent to some Billing Manager customers over the past few days. The email requests users to update their account information by clicking a link that goes to a fraudulent web site or may download what the email indicates is a “security tool.”  Intuit did not send this email–we never use emails to request personal information or update security tools. A copy of the e-mail is pasted below should you want to refer to it.

Here’s what you should do to protect yourself:

1. Be suspicious of any email that asks for personal information, requires you to download anything or requests your authentication information to access your online account.
2. Do not click any links in a suspicious email.
3. Do not download any tools from an email
4. Delete any suspicious email from your inbox and your trash bin immediately
5. If you have downloaded any programs related to the fraudulent email, delete them.  If you have provided any personal information, passwords, or logins, change your password to prevent unauthorized users from logging into your account.

Below is the fraudulent email for your reference:

Subject: NECESSARY TOOL

Body: Due to increased security measures our company developed a tool for secured access to the web-page. You should follow these instructions:

- download the tool click here

- install it on your personal computer

In case you don’t install this tool within two weeks from the moment of receiving this letter you will be denied access to services provided by our company.

We are here to support. We want to do everything we can to get you up and running. To contact us, or to view Frequently Asked Questions, please click here. Going forward, you can also click support at the bottom of any page or call us at 800-624-1465. (Don’t respond to this email; it was sent from an address that can’t accept incoming email.)

Best regards,

The Intuit Online team

The Intuit Security Team is investigating this message–please visit http://security.intuit.com/ if you have more concerns or would like more information.

Where do Billing Manager customers come from?  One of the cool tools the Billing Manager team uses to understand how customers use our website is a free app called Google Analytics.  It’s a really useful tool that helps us measure how many visits we’re getting to our website, the source of those visits, and even where our users are coming from geographically.  If your business has a website and isn’t already using Google Analytics, it’s worth taking a look.  Google Analytics will even tell you what keywords people type into search engines to find your site.  One of the fun features is the geo-visualization.  Can you spot yourself ?

The darker green areas mean that more free invoicing users are coming from that region.

Billing Manager is a completely free web invoicing solution–and tonight free got even better!  We’re committed to making Billing Manager the invoicing solution of choice for small businesses, and with our latest product changes, we’re taking a pretty big step in that direction.  We’ve made Estimates, Recurring Invoices, and PDF functionality completely free to all our users.  It’s no secret that there are plenty of invoicing apps out there—it’s actually a pretty crowded space, but one thing sets us apart from the pack—Billing Manager is free for any number of clients you have, any number of invoices you send, and now we have some other great new features available.

Here’s what’s new in Billing Manager:

• Recurring Invoices: If you regularly send the same invoice to a particular client, you can now schedule it with Billing Manager, helping save you time.
• Estimates: If you want to create estimates before billing your customers, you can have your customer approve an estimate and then convert it to an invoice.
• PDF’s: Our PDF feature is now available to all.  This lets you save invoices as a PDF and send them as PDF attachments to your clients.
• Payments & Sales Tax Report: A lot of our existing customers have told us that they’d like to add up the total amount that their customers have paid them for a certain time period.  Our new report solves this problem and is combined with our Sales Tax Report.

We still offer Intuit Merchant Service for Billing Manager if you need to accept credit cards, and nothing has changed here—there is still a monthly fee and associated transaction charges.  If you are currently signed up for our Premium Account, we will stop billing you.  Cheers!

Many of our customers are professionals who bill for their time and use Billing Manager to invoice their clients when the work is complete.  Our Intuit Labs team created a mobile application called TimeCatcher that automatically detects and saves time spent on calls with customers.  Right now it works on the Blackberry.  With TimeCatcher you can easily add completed appointments to your digital timesheet.  At the moment, it doesn’t work with Billing Manager directly, but TimeCatcher lets you can export your digital timesheet to spreadsheet format where you can copy and paste into Billing Manager.  Check it out TimeCatcher.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in some discussions with Intuit’s Innovation Lab.  They’re thinking of some interesting ways to help small businesses acquire new customers and harness the power of word-of-mouth on the web.  Think about the last time you were on Amazon.com…did the reviews help you decide what to buy?  The theory is simple: people trust each other more than they trust advertising.

Here’s where our idea comes in…If you give your customers a quick and easy way to share their opinion, they might be willing to give feedback on the great experience they’ve had with your business.  If you were able to publish these reviews and make them accessible, you could win new customers by convincing them to buy your products or services.  Since customers tend to trust each other more than ads, the reviews could create positive word-of-mouth for your business and increase online discoverability. This idea revolves around creating a way for customers to give feedback on your services without distracting you or getting in the way of doing what you do best–running your business.

The Billing Manager team is collaborating with Intuit’s Innovation Lab to test this concept with a group of select Billing Manager customers.  We would love to hear from you (chime in with comments if you have an opinion or if you want to be part of the beta group).

Here are couple examples of what something might look like to get your creativity flowing.  We currently have no plans as of 7/24/2009 for adding any of these features or designs to the current Billing Manager product (our legal guy made me say that).

If you’re a Safari user, we’ve got some good news for you!  We’ve fixed Billing Manager for the Safari 4 browser and all the issues we know about should be resolved.  After Apple released an update to Safari 4 in early June, we slowly started hearing feedback trickle in that some customers weren’t able to view their invoices.  We’ve fixed the snafu, notified Apple about this issue, done extensive testing to make sure it’s fixed, and our quality team is working diligently to make sure that Billing Manager works across all major browsers (IE 6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, and Chrome).  If you had issues with Safari, we apologize, and the good news is that I’ve confirmed with our quality engineers that our update went out at 8:27PM Pacific tonight, so you should be fine moving forward.  Cheers!

Are you guys on Twitter?  Twitter was the topic du jour in Silicon Valley a year or so ago, and since the mainstream media has picked it up this year, the service has been growing like crazy—in the last year they’ve grown to about 23 million users.  I thought it was about time to revive the Billing Manager Twitter account—check us out at @freeinvoicing.  A lot of freelancers and micro-businesses that use Billing Manager are also on Twitter, so I thought it might be useful to share some tips that I’ve learned from Intuit (@intuit) and my own use of Twitter (@willhambly).  I’m sure we’ve got some experts out there so, I’d also like to open up a forum so we can share.

Here are some uses of Twitter that I’ve found useful:

1. Keep in touch with local media via Twitter. A lot of local reporters and bloggers are on Twitter and are always looking for good stories.  Connecting with bloggers can pay off if someone writes an article about your business.  Here is an example of an independent frozen yogurt shop that got written up in a local paper.
2. Use Twitter to connect with your customers and drive foot traffic. Because Twitter is all about real-time communication, you can use it to notify customers quickly about time-sensitive news.  A great example is a bakery based in the UK that uses Twitter to let customers know when their bread is coming out of the oven.  Check out @AlbionsOven.
3. Promote your website with Twitter. If you regularly update your website or have a blog, you can use Twitter to drive traffic to your site and notify customers when you have new content or new products.  A lot of news organizations use Twitter for this exact purpose.  Some sites get a ton of traffic from Twitter and have even begun to rival search as a source of visits.

These applications of Twitter might not apply to your business, but they could be worth thinking about.  If you guys want to share your Twitter “secret sauce,” go ahead and speak up in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.

It’s been a quick four weeks since I started working as the product marketer for Billing Manager.  I’ve been busy with a lot of different things ranging from building out the development roadmap with our engineers to answering some tech support requests (we also play tricks on Dan, my boss’s boss’s boss).  What has given me the most energy over the last month, however, has been talking with customers and working to understand how we can make Billing Manager better.  That’s why I created the Customer Council, a way for us to have a dialog with customers.

Our Customer Council event will be next week on Tuesday, July 7th.   If you signed up for the Customer Council via replying to this post, I have already contacted you about this opportunity, but if you haven’t, please reply to the post and also grab some time on our calendar for July 7th.

Here’s how you can reserve a spot:
1. Follow this link to see my calendar. The calendar is called Jiffle and is web-based scheduling tool. Click here: http://www.jifflenow.com/grp/Will_Hambly
2. Navigate to July 7th, where you can see 30 minute slots from 1PM to 5PM Pacific time available.
3. Go ahead and set up a meeting through the tool (please only 30 minute meetings)
4. I will provide a dial-in number for the meeting.

I haven’t used Jiffle before, but so far it’s working great, so also let me know what you think about the calendar tool and if I should use it again.  Looking forward to our conversation!

In the last week, I’ve spent the bulk of my time responding to customer feedback and putting together what I’m calling a “roadmap” for Billing Manager.  The roadmap is a set of initiatives and product changes that we’re going make to improve Billing Manager.  Let me be clear on this: customers are the boss.  At Intuit we believe in customer driven innovation, so I thought I’d ask for your feedback now on where we should be spending our time.  Here are some of the top requests, but if there are others, please mention them by adding a comment.  If you’re really passionate about sharing you can also join our Customer Council.

1. Reports: Billing Manager was designed to have key information surface without having to run reports.  We currently offer the Sales Tax Report, but I’ve been hearing that we could do better by offering more reports.  What other kinds of reports would be helpful?
2. Switch Currency: If you’re outside the U.S. this is an obvious one–you want to send invoices in your home currency.  This feature would essentially add a drop-down in the “Settings” area to switch your Billing Manager currency to something other than dollars.
3. Importing Contacts: We offer a way to import your contacts from Outlook in the “Settings” tab.  What about importing contacts from Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail?  This will keep you from having to re-enter names and email addresses.
4. Exporting Invoices: Some customers write in about wanting to export their invoices to Excel or CSV because they want to “backup” their invoices.  Rest assured that your data is already backed-up or servers , but I’m still hearing this request.  Can you help us understand why you want this?

You’re the boss–what should we work on?  Vote below and if you could add more details explaining why you’d like these features in the comments, that would be helpful for the team to understand.

In the last week, I’ve immersed myself in customer feedback, reading and replying to your thoughts, opinions, ideas, and complaints.  The team and I have spoken with a handful of customers over the phone and we’re going to continue to do this for one very simple reason: you’re the boss.
We have a ton of requests and things to work on that have been submitted through the “Feedback” button in the product, but we want to hear more from you—that’s why we’re recruiting customers for our new Customer Council.

What you’ll get for joining the Customer Council:

1. Direct access to the folks at Intuit who work on Billing Manager
2. Influence over new features and design while they’re still in development
3. Input into the vision for Billing Manager going forward

What we ask from you in return:

1. Commit 6 months to helping our team out
2. Spend about an hour a month working with us and giving feedback (this could be over email, phone, or in person)
3. Share your honest opinions and thoughts

Sound like a good deal?  Reply to this post and I’ll reach out to arrange our first meeting.

If you’re a Mac user, you probably already know this, but last night and today we’ve been experiencing some issues with the Safari 4 web browser.  I’ve been hearing from customers via the Feedback button that some pages in the product aren’t loading or that it looks like invoices have disappeared.  These problems are isolated to the Safari 4 browser, so rest assured, your data and invoices are still safe.

Our quality guru, Mehul, is heading up an investigation into the best ways to fix this problem.  We apologize for the issue, and while the team is fixing it, the best work around is to access Billing Manager with Mozilla’s Firefox browser.  Mehul and I will give you an update once this is fixed or when we have more information.

Update 4:45PM: I just spoke with quality extraordinaire Mehul.  He’s done some extensive testing across different browsers and operating systems to get to the bottom of this problem.   Mehul notes that  “objects either don’t appear at all, or the page is rendered only partially and existing links do not work.   A quick fix in most cases is to refresh the page in Safari.”  I don’t have an exact time for when we should have these issues all hammered out, but again, your data is safe and we’re working on the browser issue.

It’s been an exciting few months here at Billing Manager and the greater Intuit.  I’ve got some good news to share!  We now have a product marketing and development team focused on growing and improving Billing Manager.  I’ll share more about the team and what we’re working on soon, but I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that we’re here and to introduce myself.
My name is Will Hambly and I’m the product marketer for Billing Manager.  I started with the team a few weeks ago and have been with Intuit since 2007, working in product management and marketing in the small business space (here are two of the products I worked on).  I’m also an electric guitar player, avid coffee drinker, and like to get outside and run.

As I’ve ramped up on Billing Manager, one thing I’ve been focusing on is speaking with customers and learning what you like and don’t like about Billing Manager.   The goal of this is to figure out what we need to start working on now and also what else customers want to see from our invoicing app.  If you’ve got feedback you want to share or are willing to meet over the phone or in person (if you’re near Mountain View, CA, consider this an invitation for lunch at our campus), go ahead and reply to this post and we’ll arrange something.

There’s a lot more to come, so expect and introduction to our development team and to hear about what we’re working on to make the product better.  Happy Friday.  Cheers!

Have you noticed? Billing Manager is sporting a fresh new look! Last night, developers not only spiffed up the site but delivered one of your most-requested features. Also, you can save time and money by taking advantage of new special deals our team is offering.

New Look
Site pages got a facelift, but Billing Manager workflow hasn’t changed. You’ll find your favorite features and links in the same place, with one minor exception. The Billing Manager menu has moved from the right side of the screen to the left (though the Sign Out link remains on the right).

New menu location

Options that lie underneath this menu and elsewhere in Billing Manager remain the same. They just may look a bit different.

New Feature
Lots of you have requested the ability to create and email PDF files. Now you can! Email PDF invoices or estimates as attachments and provide clients with their own electronic copy. You’re also able to save PDF files for your own records too. PDF generation is a premium feature. Haven’t yet signed up for Premium? Read on to learn about our special upgrade offer.

Special Offers
Billing Manager is offering new premium users a price cut. Upgrade to Premium and save half off the monthly fee. New Premium subscribers pay only $4.95 a month (reduced from the regular price of $9.95).

Looking for an even better deal? If you sign up to take credit card and eCheck payments with Merchant Service for Billing Manager, you pay nothing for Premium service. A merchant service account (a monthly fee of $14.95) includes a premium subscription and all its great features! Try this add on service now, and we’ll waive the $14.95 for the first month. Sign up.

There’s never been a better time to take advantage of all Billing Manager has to offer.

If you use Billing Manager to run your remodeling/renovation business, we’d love to hear from you. We want to chat about how you’re using Billing Manager and get your feedback on the site. What’s in it for you? Our eternal thanks, a better Billing Manager, and the chance that your business may be featured in a published article.

If you’re interested, please leave a comment on this post, and we’ll contact you.

Thanks!

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from the Billing Manager Team. Apologies. We’ve neglected the blog for a bit, but we have a good excuse! The team has been hard at work, improving Billing Manager.

Soon the site will have a few new features and a spiffy new look for 2009. I’ll publish another post with more details next week. Meanwhile, stay tuned. Enhancements coming soon!

Happy Holidays!

I wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know that PC Magazine gave Billing Manager a great review last week. The reviewer, Kathy Yakal, who specializes in small business accounting software, highlights the simplicity and ease of Billing Manager when compared with more complex and expensive programs. She says that Billing Manager is “an exceptionally clean, well-designed site that makes billing faster and easier.”

We were pleased that she truly understands Billing Manager’s mission. Not everyone needs the full accounting features that come with QuickBooks. Billing Manager is tailor-made for the small business that just wants to send out invoices and keep track of who owes what. And, like the best things in life, Billing Manager is free. Unlimited invoicing at no cost to you. Ho! Ho! Ho!

Read the PC Magazine review.

MyCorporation (owned by Intuit), is offering free incorporation for new businesses through Dec. 5th.  Check out this link:

http://mycorporation.intuit.com/commerce/catalog/category.jsp?categoryId=cat0000000000006337274