22 Replies

This is quite a popular idea, so we will be actively exploring it. I'll be in touch if there are any updates.

The ability to edit the Purchase Orders, Credit Notes and Statement layouts would be very useful and a welcome development.

This would be great - would give a very clean and professional way for clients to keep up to date with payments.

Statement customisation would be very beneficial. It needs to list olded invoices first with a running total of money owed. Also ageing boxes need to be incorporated.

The online statement page would be better if you could be "white labelled" it or make it less Clearbooks more my company so to speak, maybe an extra payment option for a white labelling Clearbooks?

Not that I don't love Clearbooks I do, I'm just not sure some of my customers understand what Clearbooks is and get confused looking at their statement page linked from their email.

I'd like Expenses to be customisable as well - including the ability to customise the Items labels of the main table

Agreed. I cannot send the statements in their current form to my customers. Please make them more like every other statement issued in every other bookkeeping system without"unpaid" invoices on it and with the ageing boxes. I had sent a physical example in to you but you all expect us just to spend time searching on forums all the time for feedback getting problems solved & quite frankly life is too busy!

Any news on this? It seems to be top of the "popular list", 3 years old, and not a major piece of programming.

I need the customer statements be white labelled without them looking like Clear Books. At the moment this is confusing for customers. Can this be done soon?

Great to see this at the top of the Popular list but concerning to see it has not been implemented after 3 years?

We are currently focusing on revamping the templates engine with one of the key requirements for it to be easily applied to all documents (hopefully also emails). Invoices take priority here, other documents will follow.

The work on this has only started and we really hope to see this live within a few months. But any estimate will be more of a guess as we are still in the research/technology review stage.

Is there anything wrong with the way we customise the invoices already though? Works fine for me and I don't see many people complaining?

But there are loads complaining about the statements.....

Are you possibly fixing the wrong thing here? Can't we just have the same customisation options we have right now for the invoices applied to the statements? Seems straightforward and relatively quick and easy to a simpleton like me.......

Further customisation would be great and I am sure highly requested by others. But I think one of the main issues with the statements is the excessive Clearbooks branding on the Full statement page which could confuse customers.

If this was just removed then it would go a long way to appease many I am sure (and probably a quick fix).

Hi Simon,

We had a multitude of requests asking for improvements of the invoice templates part of the system; these came from various channels. They are subdivided like so:

Usability - currently the editing of the template is completely separate from the actual invoice view. Many new users find the process to be less than straight-forward. Needless to say that experienced users who took the time to learn how things work are past the learning hurdle. But we wish to make things not only easier to use, but also easier to learn.

Functionality - we have had many requests for additional customisations, I wouldn't know where to start. If we are to accommodate for these in the way the system currently work, the page will quickly become unmanageable and will require extra work.

In the way we are currently envision it, you'll have the invoice edit page and a 'customer copy' tab next to it where you can see the actual invoice (the print copy if you wish), this is where you can switch templates, or edit the invoice look, including any invoice specific modifications (like company address, payment details, yes/no VAT, etc.). The edit will be done using modern technologies like the ones on Google Apps or the modern Apple Office package - hovering over an element in edit mode will allow you to customise it using a popover box.

What's more, the proposed solution will allow us to easily apply the customisation to all (printed) documents, such as the one in this very idea.

Your proposal is highly reasonable - take a working solution and apply it somewhere else. But the solution is not ideal and we believe we can do much better. So while your proposal will work in the short term, we will be cloning a bad tomato; growing a new good tomato may take a bit more time, but once cloned, we have a basket full on good tomatoes. Which is really where we want to end up with, because tomatoes tend to stay on our system for years - we want them to be good ones.

Needless to say that every user uses the system differently, thus using some parts of it more than others. But as far as product management and user-experience design goes, the invoice part of the system is only second to the explain screen in its potential provide higher value to our broad user base. Again, the solution is not invoice-specific, simply because invoices are very important to many of our users (the face of their business or a mini-marketing document if you wish), we will first apply the solution there, then to other documents.

I'm sure you find it better justified now.

Thanks for all your work.

In the meantime, as Andy Gambles has requested, could the Clearbooks branding simply be removed from the clients' statements pages?

I'd support Ian and Andy's request for removing the Clear books logo from those pages. As we're paying for a service, I don't feel it's appropriate or helpful for our own customers to see extra advertising.

and so another year passes.

Sorry about this too Andy - the development focus has been very much on Final accounts which is almost ready for official release. Once this big project is complete there will be resource available for some of the bigger community requested ideas.

All our announcements about what we are working on and the updates to features are released each month on the News section:

https://secure.clearbooks.co.uk/community/news

Is this done yet? Do the clearbooks team implement anything on the suggestions portal? This is the most liked suggestion and it hasn't been implemented even though it's 5 years old. 5 years is a long time.

I've given up ever hoping to see this implemented. I've already moved one of my companies over to another system and will do the same for the other once i'm close to my year end.

Im hoping to actually see the feature implemented for displaying more than 2 decimal places on an invoice. This is 4th in the list of suggestions which have yet to be implemented. My idea is that by pushing to have the other suggestions implemented that they will finally, finally get round to what I need. I've been sticking with clearbooks for years now, but it's becoming apparent they're not particularly bothered about keeping existing paying customers happy, they only want growth. Probably they had some investment a few years ago and the focus of that investment team will solely be growth and not customer experience.

Reply to this idea

Attach images by dragging and dropping or upload
 

Your comments will be public and can be answered by anyone in the Clear Books community.

Find out what we do and who we are