The way it works is pretty simple.  Just make sure you’ve entered an email address for the client you want to send the invoice to, then view your invoice, and click the “Send to Client” button.  HourPatch will tell you who you’re about to send the invoice to, and ask you if you want to send a copy to yourself, as well.  You can also include a message to the client, if you like.  The client will receive an email from you with your message, and the PDF for your invoice will be attached.  Give it a try!

Today I published a couple of new features to make your invoices a little more flexible.

You can now include a note at the top of any invoice, which is definitely handy when you have specific instructions or information that needs to be passed on with wherever your PDF may go.

Also, it’s now possible to hide individual time entries on your invoices.  Or, you can show time entries, but leave off the notes that you entered with each time entry.  Sometimes you don’t want to share with your client all the details of what you did and when.

That’s all for now!  Coming up next, I plan on adding more ways for you to visualize how many hours you’re spending on a project over time, and how much money you’re scheduled to make, week to week.  Stay tuned.

Have you ever asked yourself this question?  As a freelancer, it’s easy to feel like you’re busy all the time.  And yet, it can be hard to know where all that time is going, especially when it seems like your billable hours aren’t that high.  The end of the month comes, you’re putting your invoices together, and even though you spent 50 hours/week at your computer, you’re getting paid like you spent 15 hours/week.  What happened?

Your freelance work hours can be broken down into two types: those you get paid for, and those that you don’t.  You probably want to maximize the former and minimize the latter.

One problem I’ve had in the past is that lots of little bits of time get spent here and there, and often I don’t bill for them.  This problem is usually the result of distraction: I’m working on one thing, but then a squeeze a few minutes of something else in the middle because an email pops up…

Email and a Sense of Urgency

You probably check your email about 30 times a day, plus or minus.  So, it can be common that you’re working on something for one client, and get an email from a different client (or a friend), and you feel like you should reply right away.  The effect of that is, you disrupt work on the one project, and spend a little bit of time on another project, but it’s so little that you don’t end up billing for it.  Lose/lose situation.  And is your immediate response usually that important?

The Soft Tasks

Being self-employed, there’s some work that you just don’t get paid for.  You probably keep a blog, or at least maintain your website, to market yourself.  You read blogs or do research to stay on top of your field.  Maybe you have a project that’s not paid, but it’s a portfolio piece, or it’s for a friend.

Even though you don’t get paid for this stuff, it’s still work.  And, it’s worthwhile to keep tabs on just how much time you spend on these kinds of tasks.  Keeping tabs on the “soft tasks” will help you know where all your time went.  Maybe you’re spending too much time on these tasks?  Maybe you’re not spending enough (when was the last time you updated that blog?).

It’s All About Staying On Task

The key to maximizing your time spent on things you’re actually getting paid for is to stay on task, and to know how much of your time is spent on things you don’t get paid for.  Being self-employed, it can be harder to maintain structure for yourself.  Helping yourself to build structure is a big part of what HourPatch does.  When you’re going to work on something, schedule it.  Even if you’re just “scheduling” it 5 minutes ahead of time.  The act of drawing each little block of work time on your schedule is a commitment to yourself, that that’s what you’re doing right now.  You’re not emailing other clients.  You’re not catching up on Facebook.  You’re getting things done.

Everything I’m doing that’s work-related falls under a Project in HourPatch.  Each project for my clients is an HourPatch Project, but so is each of my Coffeeshopped projects.  Even “Blogging” is a project.  That way I respect each of my tasks equally: when it’s time to work on something, it gets my total focus.

Once you start to organize your schedule this way, it’s easy to see exactly how many hours you’re working per week.  In fact, HourPatch shows you, right at the top of your schedule, how many hours you have planned for a week.  So even though you’re self-employed, you can begin to treat your work more like a steady job.  It’s key to maintaining your sanity, and your self-employed success.

Late last week and over the weekend, I finished up work on improving the invoicing side of HourPatch.  With the first release of the invoicing features, you could easily generate invoices based on your time entries and your hourly rate, but that was it.

This new release now adds the ability to add individual entries on your invoices that are not time-based.  So, you can do things like charge a flat rate for a project, or charge for fees or expenses.

… and it’s only going to get better, folks.

All the existing problems were related to the schedule interface, which uses a whole lot of Javascript! Upgrading to Prototype 1.6.1 solved some of the big display problems, which were being caused by a bug where class names weren’t being applied to dynamically created elements. So that was an easy fix.

Anyway, if anyone finds any additional bugs, I’m always around to fix them ASAP. Just contact me.

Another tiny helpful little improvement is that the names of your projects on the schedule page, in the sidebar, are now links to the project pages themselves.  That should save you a click here and there.

Today I published an update that makes the schedule interface a more similar experience to using iCal, Google Calendar, or similar calendar applications: you can now slide blocks of time around on the schedule, and your changes will be automatically saved.

It was already possible to slide the start and end of a block of time, but some people (including myself) wanted to be able to move an entire block at once, either to a different part of the day, or a different day altogether.  Well, here you go.

And if you haven’t tried out the slick scheduling tool on HourPatch for yourself, well, why not sign up for free and try it out?