We've changed a few things to help you get those invoices paid a bit faster. Hot off the press are a few changes to the Invoice E-Mailing feature...


We've made it a little quicker/easier to change the default invoice recipient. Contacts which look to be somewhat related to the company you've billed will be displayed for immediate access.

A new comment tracking option lets you store a note against the client. This way you have a record of when a bill was actually sent, who it was sent to, and which employee actually sent it.

Like the title says, you can now configure your WORKetc system to accept payment through PayPal Payments Pro, or Express Checkout.

Head on over to Settings > Merchant Integration to configure your Express/Pro PayPal Integration mode. Naturally, Website Payments Standard is still available.

Express Checkout is available to any PayPal business, all you have to do is create some API credentials as in the example below:



Once this is all configured, your clients can pay you through your secure customer area.



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We've received a lot of great feedback from numerous customers with regards to the Lead editor over the past few months, and today we've deployed a number of improvements to the Lead Profiles tool based on your comments.

Notable changes include;

• Ability to edit the prospective client's full contact details, right inside the lead editor.
• Record a referring contact.
• Record an unlimited number of "other" related contacts.
  
• Define a persisted Lead description/summary, in addition to the standard comments/discussion tools.
• A more streamlined layout for better readability.
  

The ability to quickly filter and select a specific object from an infinitely large pool of many different types of things presents a big design challenge. Today we've released an update to the Entry editor. Remember, an Entry is inherited by Tasks, Support Cases, Events, Timesheets, Projects, Disbursements and even Subscription purchases. This is what gives WORKetc fantastic scalability and provides you the option to "attach anything to anything".

Below is a screen shot of your new Entry Selector:



As you can see, you have a number of features at your disposal to make isolating that particular parent item quick and easy.

• "Find as you type" with keywords that filter by Entry and/or Contact name or even Entry # if you know it.
  
• Filter by a specific Entry type.
• Sort by Type, Item Name, Customer or Entry #.
  

Today we've deployed a big update the main contact/address book editor. We hope you'll find the new layout and features a pleasure to work with. Feedback so far has been great, so please keep it coming.



Among better readability than the previous version you should find we've also grouped together information in a much more meaningful way. Numbers and Addresses are always related, but it's quick and easy to see which number is for which location etc.

A number of users have requested the ability to quickly duplicate a set of Projects and/or sub-tasks for reuse against different clients. This feature was released earlier today. If you navigate to the project you want to make a copy of, you'll find a new link to perform the duplication.



As illustrated above, you have a couple of options for how you perform the copy;

• Just the project
• The project and all of it's sub projects
• The project and all of it's sub-projects as well as Tasks

We're happy to announce that WORKetc users can now share projects with customers. If you're already taking advantage of the other Customer Area features such as invoice payments, support ticketing and knowledge base, all you have to enable this feature is open the Project you want shared, and turn on the new Client Access option.



This feature will allow the client to view descriptions, dates, progress and comments. They can also post comments and upload files and pictures within their comments for quick and easy collaboration.

I was just reading a blog post over at Internet Redux.  Titled Basecamp not for you? Check out Wrike, the author extols the virtues of a project management software because of its price, $3.99 per user per month.  For $12/month,this author can get his 3 employees all using the same project management tool.

I don't know about you, but the thought of trusting the very guts of my business to an operator who wants to charge $3.99 a month scares me.  I've worked hard at running the numbers on WORKetc.  With our program of constant development, redundant hosting infrastructure and A1 support, we would be bankrupted pretty quickly.

So, if you are a small business owner looking for the cheapest solution on the market, please be weary.  Going cheap and the risks of doing so would easily out weigh the cost saving. 

More importantly, we believe we have a far superior product offering - look at the whole offering and not just the charge on your credit card.

This is what one of our very real customers had to say about support:

Scott Blitstein over at Web Worker Daily has just posted a great review of WORKetc.  What is great about this is Scott was a user on Veetro, which was essentially WORKetc version 1, so he knows first hand how far we have come:

That's right.  We don't believe single purpose web applications have much of a future.  It doesn't make sense. 

Why would a business owner use one application for billing, another application for CRM, another app for uploading documents and who knows how many other applications, just to run their business day-to-day?

Multiple web apps quickly lead to lost productivity and probably a migraine from having to remember all those password combinations!  Oh and lets not even mention the cost of training staff on each system and all the licensing fees.

One of our good customers, Peggy Murrah (www.peggymurrah.com/), summed this up recently: