Welcome. This is our very first blog post.
As we prepare AnyHow, formally known as Grinch, for a public release we've decided to start writing more about our progress, updates, changes, etc.
These will be more technical listings for the beta users to follow along with. In the future we will write more user friendly descriptions of things but posts like this one are more engineering minded. Short and sweet.
Version 1.2.12
This release contains a lot of new features and a ton of bug fixes and improvements. I'll discuss the features first.
AnyHow
This software was originally built for internal use by Netlandish Inc., a software consultancy. It was built because we didn't feel there was a viable option available to help us run the business. The existing options were not optimized for our workflow, were far too niche/specific, and way too expensive. So we decided to build our own.
Originally we named the software Grinch because we were angry at the world for having to build it to begin with. What started small has turned into a very large and complex application that we feel is better than anything on the market. So we decided to prepare it for other users outside of Netlandish.
Now Grinch is a cool name and all but didn't think it spoke well for the application and how it can help businesses of all sizes. Also, it's a trademarked name and we didn't want any trouble.
We kicked some names around and settled on AnyHow. We just liked the way it rolled off the tongue and also how we can make it fit our style of work and the style of a lot of modern companies today. That is: Work from Anywhere and However you'd like.
We're a remote company, so being able to work anywhere is very important to us. Also we need to be able to work in flexible formats. No one methodology works across the board when you're dealing with multiple clients who each have their own unique way of working.
So that's the very short version of the name AnyHow. We'll write more about that later when we're actually open to the public.
Supporting Invoice Payments Online
You can now accept payments online for your customer invoices. You can accept payment via Credit Card or Paypal. For CC payment the following gateways are supported (more to come!)
- Stripe
- Authorize.net
- Paypal (CC Payment Gateway)
Of course normal Paypal web payment is also supported.
Also part of this is the ability for your customers to pay multiple invoices at once. When they're viewing your invoice online they will see a listing of all previous invoices to them on the left. They can pay 1, or all outstanding, invoices at once. We really think this will help each of our users!
Natural Time Input
Previously, when logging time into a time sheet or individual time log, you had to enter time in a decimal format. For instance, 1 hour, 30 minutes was entered as 1.5. It was even more confusing for periods of less than 1 hour. For instance, entering 15 minutes would be entered as 0.25 (25% of 1 hour is 15 minutes). Those days are done.
Now you can enter time using a more natural format. Going back to our examples before, you can enter 1 hour, 30 minutes as 1h 30m and 15 minutes as 15m.
Of course, if you prefer the old way, that still works as well.
Quick Invoice Tool
We know it can be tedious to create invoices for each client every week, month, etc. For us the 1st and 16th of the month was always a pain because creating all the invoices for the previous two weeks was such a chore. Not anymore though! The quick invoice tool will allow you to select date range and it will show you every project pending invoice, grouped by client. You can easily exclude projects. The tool will generate and submit each invoice to each client. You can choose to generate and not submit the invoice if you'd like as well. You can customize the email they receive for the invoice submission as well, if you'd like.
Now creating invoices is literally a 30 second task.
Self Refunding
While we aren't charging anything yet, when we do, we want customers who are unhappy to be able to get a refund exactly when they want it. So we added the ability to request, and receive, a refund in a few clicks of the mouse. Of course there are safe guards in place for abusers but we hope this is useful for customers who are not fully satisfied with the service.
Charting Updates
We've updated our charting libraries and provided better grouping. We fell this helps you get a birds eye view of your business faster. Of course all the same level of detail is present.
Default Invoice Settings
We often would find ourselves creating invoices, changing the settings to meet our workflow, etc. For each invoice we'd have to update settings. It got to be a pain so we added default settings that you can configure per Organization. From now on creating a new invoice will have your configured settings applied by default. Of course you can change them per individual invoice if you'd like.
Added Organization Profiles
We have a lot of freelancers who use the platform and they can belong to many Organizations. It's often beneficial to provide different data for use by each different Org. For instance, say you want to use email address A for Org A and email address B for Org B. You now can do that. Each account has it's own profile data and each Organization the account belongs to will have a unique profile specific for each Org.
Bug Fixes / Improvements
This will just be a generalized list of bug fixes. It wouldn't make sense to explain these further as some of them are very technical or just general improvements that are fairly subtle.
- Fixing previous payment display issue
- Create uniformity in buttons used throughout the app
- Add preview to initial Wiki page creation form
- Add "Project" column to invoice listing tables
- Added this blog to the website
- Easier Organization settings navigation, stay on the same tab
- Update form help text across settings to be more clear
- Rename "Home" to "Discussions"
- Update projects pending invoice label to "Projects Needing Invoice"
- Remove ability to edit an invoice after it's marked as paid
- Migrate accounting system to use a pivot email address model
- Fix bug where incorrect name was shown when replying to a discussion post
- Fix bug in Organization settings where changing from time sheets to time logs would hide all settings in Time Tracking.
- Update the order of tag items to be: Teams, Clients, Projects, Employees. This helps you find the tag you need faster based on the expected number of results per tag.
- Fix bug where discussions tagged for a team were still displayed to other employees of the same Organization
- Fixed a handful of other tiny bugs that don't deserve their own line item.
Wrapping Up
That's the gist of the update. We hope you enjoy the new features and as always, please provide any feedback you have. The more honest the better. Even if it's bad feedback, we welcome it!