What more would you like?

Thanks @Gav32. Help me out here. Can I ask why? Payslips I can get, but given we're producing what amount to 'draft' statements that almost certainly will be amended by the professional accountant, what would be the reasoning?

I can see the utility of an electronic snapshot, but PDF?

I think i've mentioned it before somewhere, but I would really like a way of tracking quotes and then invoice on these quotes, merging one or more quote into a specific invoice...

Hey Dennis - the reason was exactly that - snapshot for printing, marking up and making changes accordingly before submitting to accountant for his review. I must admit, its not very important as it can be printed anyway. Just thought if it could be pdf'd would be neat!

If we are trying to build a "community" it would be useful if members could contact other members direct rather than add a comment to a post which may have "ended".

hi,

I would like some of these things:

1. An expansion of the invoice timeline on the homepage - so that i can see when money has come in etc for the whole year. Would also be useful to put costs alongside (whilst a graph is lovely its not neccessary and pure figures is good as list).. But basically a month by month breakdown for the whole year.

2. Be able to see on one page where money is coming from split by client for the whole year.

3. I would like to be able to split expenses out a little in a non tax sense and then be able to attach some invoices to those costs so i can see i'm taking enough money for specific services. An example - I'm a web developer charging clients for hosting. I want to be able to see how much i'm charging and how much i'm taking on hosting easily. Also it would be good to be able to split some expenses by client as well - for similar comparisions.

I appreciate Freeagent is marketed as a tool to use in conjunction with your accountant - but as all the relevant info is being entered anyway a way to manipulate it in terms of reports would make sense. I liked the reporting stuff in Freshbooks (US company) but it didn't do expenses etc.

Great product though!
thanks
Chris

hi - sounds great.

I don't want to get too "web2.0bollocks" on you at all - but would be good if i could tag expenses and invoices in a number of ways for me to assess my stuff. i.e. a cost might relate to "hosting" and also charged to "clientA" - but then it also relates to "companyB" who fed me the business and regularly does...

Later on i would like to see how much business "companyB" has fed me for the year / specified period - which might relate to 6/7 clients

I think this makes it sound more complicated than it is.... and Its difficult i appreciate because everyone is different and has different needs...

cheers for the response.
Chris

That could have privacy implications (daft as it may sound)

Chris - thanks for the props - much appreciated. Tagging is an important topic and one I've looked at for over 2 years. There are yays and nays but I appreciate what you're saying.

For instance, a tag cloud could be useful to give you a 'visual' of how expenses are going. The flipside is that if you make it too complicated then the value degrades.

In my del.icio.us, I have some 300 tags - goodness knows how I ended up with that but I know it needs serious gardening.

I've concluded that sensible tagging systems are a step up from A1234/EE/678 but they are hierarchical in this context and require some thought and discipline.

BTW - I'm not geeky - I've just learned these things the hard way.

Hi,

Yeah thats why i hesitated to use the word tagging... because it brings with it some expectations and pre-conceptions and to some extent its not right. I'd be happy with custom categories and the ability to assign something to multiple categories.... although i guess you could say that amounts to the same thing.

I agree its about discipline... but for me its better if that comes in at the user level and not the software level....or an implementation which is flexible enough but will stop just short of enough rope ....

cheers
Chris

No worries Chris - these are all good thoughts but even a Web 2.0y business needs to think really hard about user stuff. Don't read that as 'not happening BTW.'

I'm very conscious that Ed and the team have always had that in mind and so they don't necessarily go after every new shiny thing - even though it can be very tempting at times.

It's a good one to revisit and maybe put out in a weekly update so everyone gets a chance to express a view.

Hi again,

One more thing I would like to the ability to add repeat expenses (in the same way we have repeat invoices). I have monthly expenses which rarely change... any chance?

thanks again

+1 for some sort of categorization of expenses. My accountant wants to know the breakdown of my expenses for his spreadsheet, and at the moment I find it difficult to find the right numbers for him here.

Building a community
Dennis - I agree with the privacy implications. My problem was that I wanted to contact a member to ask him a question on a topic which was three months old. I added a post but am I right in thinking he will only see it if he looks at the "old" post again. If he doesn't I can't contact him. Do you see what I was getting at? I also understand the conflict between building a community and my wanting to communicate "off community". I'm open to suggestions.

Sounds good... I guess in an ideal world (and think I may have mentioned this before), I would be able to keep track of all quotes i've made to clients, mark them when approved/completed and then invoice them at the end of the month or at a specified time. I'm thinking primarily of those clients of mine whereby they get me to quote on each bit of work e.g. update contact form on a website, add a new (small) feature. I wouldn't want each of these to end up on a separate invoice...

Actually, what would also be good would be to also merge a number of these quotes into an email I can send to the client...

Continuing my thinking, I guess it all depends on how far you want to push the scope of FreeAgent... I could see a use for being able to give client access to a quote system so they could see outstanding quotes, the status of each quote and potentially add comments etc I guess then you're almost becoming an issue/quote/bug tracking system too which I understand is completely off your core focus and would only apply to a number of your customers (the IT developer-type customer) but could still be worth thinking about?!?

I guess this is something that could be done when you release some kind of API, but it would depend on what level of data you let us get at :)

Would it be possible to give more flexibility over the design of the invoices to be able to mimic our headed paper etc? I know you could print onto your own headed paper but I'm thinking about the situations where you're emailing PDFs of invoices...

Actually, those categories or 'accounts' are exactly what he wants. The spreadsheet just has them by month and the Trial Balance I used to get the amounts aren't subtotaled by month. If I just do my expense reimbursements by month by account, then I should be ok. I just didn't do that at the start.

My accountant does (and his assistant) do have logins; only the assistant has used it so far. I was using the spreadsheet because I couldn't get the VAT to work for my first VAT return, but that is sorted now after redoing my invoices in FreeAgent.

So, I guess, +0 on the need for categorization. Would be nice to have subtotals by month, but not required.

@brett: do you know why your accountant's assistant has only been in once? We'd like to think FreeAgent helps them help you if that makes sense. All feedback is helpful and welcome.

Fully understand Stuart. Satisfaction is doing a great job for us at the moment and they've got a lot of cool plans that will make this service better. I guess you could remind questioners that your contact details are available via your website link. Gives them a choice.

If you think the answer would require divulging confidential information then I'd request they contact you (with time etc) again, pointing to the link and explaining why.

Generally though, the more answers that are out in the open, the easier it is for people to get maximum value.