Reviews and some wÖnderful new features

Some trumpet blowing to start with! Yesterday a review was posted of our small business accounting software and it said we’ve got all the features a small business might want! Thanks very much for noticing us, Red Ferret.

In other news we released an update to Bionic Books last night enabling (at last) proper support for characters with accents, so hopefully now wherever in the world you are, Bionic Books is going to work well. We’ve also fixed a bunch of small bugs and we’ve upgraded all users onto full https (secure browsing) for all of your accounts pages. This used to be optional because it causes a slight slowness to the connection, but since we’re but now in Turbo Accounting mode we decided it should just be turned on for everyone.

We have another bunch of new features in the pipeline here, and we have also been making a long term plan for all of the upcoming developments. I’m hoping soon to be able to set-up a system where you can give us some feedback on our prioritisation of these features (and maybe you’ll have some feedback on what we’re planning to do too).

At the moment we are working on a mechanism that will allow you to take your own backups and restore from them whenever you want (in addition of course to the comprehensive backups we take!). Having local copies of your accounts data is a legal requirement in some counties so its an important thing for us to support, but hopefully it’ll be a useful addition for everyone. It’ll give you the ability to easily backtrack on things and it is another way of being able to try stuff out without worrying about messing things up.

Turbo Accounting – Even more time to do other stuff

Hi all

We’ve just put a new release live. We’ve been noticing that the Balance Sheet and P+L screens in our accounting software could take quiiite a while to load if you have a lot of data.

On one hand you could say that it was understandable; for a reasonable size set of data there are tens of thousands of calculations needed to support the drill downs, subtotalling and everything else. In some systems they’d expect you to request a report, wait for it to be generated, even wait until tomorrow for it. But not here. We were determined that we were going to keep the ‘live’ balance sheet and other reports going, and we had to find a way to make it faster.

So, we wrote a set of performance tests and set to work honing the calculation mechanism. Todays release is the culmination of the process; you’ll notice the results immediately, in some cases we have made almost a tenfold improvement in the screen loading. Hope you enjoy it -hope you enjoy having the time to get on with the stuff you really want to be doing.

The Official Launch!

Woo hoo!, a big announcement today – our small business accounting software is officially live! (and our first ever press release too!)

Invoice Printing(!), Subscriptions and VIP users

We’ve just released a big update to Bionic Books and finally the feature many of you have requested is live – invoice printing:

a PDF Invoice printed from Bionic Books

With this release we also introduced two levels of Bionic Books user; those using our free package and those paying the bargain price of £5.50 a month for the premium package; yep, you’ve guessed it, invoice printing is something you’ll have be a subscriber to get. Hopefully this isn’t too controversial; we put a lot of effort into developing the very best small business accountancy software, and having reviewed all of the competition our subscription price still makes us the cheapest option by a long way. We’ll always of course always keep our free package free.

Lastly on the subscription front, people who have been BB users since the very beginning will now find that they are setup as VIP subscribers – this means you get all the functionality free, and thats all we can do to say thank you for your support, feedback and interest over the time BB has been developing.

Other changes in this release include:

• The timeline of journal entries; we’ve changed the screen format to show each transaction part on a seperate line, which makes exporting to Excel more straightforward and also makes the export structure similar to the data import structure, allowing you to use this to create personal backups of data if you need to (for example in Portugal we hear it is a legal requirement to do so).
• Renaming of Bank Accounts (Admin > Bank Accounts)
• Capture of full customer information (Admin > Customers)

518 days

A quick note to apologise for the downtime to Bionic Books last night (2:37 to 6:07 GMT). The datacenter had to apply an essential security upgrade. This is a rare event (518 days since the last time) and normally we’re able to tell you that its coming, but in this case because of its importance it had to be applied immediately. We’re very sorry for any problems that it caused.

Experiment Away!

Phew! It’s been a very hectic week for us.  Lots of support and feature requests, a few patches rolled out to production, and yet more functionality.  Hot on the heels of editing invoices, we can now announce the very exciting introduction of the Test Company feature….

Switch to your test company

Every user now has access to a second company – a Test Company, where you can try out anything in Bionic Books without affecting your real data; so go for it, try out those crazy journal entries, add debits and credits, try data importing – anything that you’re not sure about you can now try out completely safely with your test company to see what happens.

In other news we’ve had a review by Software Hawker: http://softwarehawker.com/hawkerblog/2008/12/top-5-small-business-accounting-software-you-can-consider/ who say we are “The definitive choice for the cash-struck entrepreneur.” (superb news!) We’ve got loads more interesting functionality to come so for someone to say that we’re already in a good position is really exciting.

Looking forward to hearing from you about how you are finding the new release!

All the best

J

Happy New Year!

A new year and a new release of Bionic Books!

We’ve had some excellent coverage on the web lately and we’ve had a surge of new users – hello to all of you!  We’ve also had a number of requests for new features which is very exciting and I’m pleased to announce that we can launch some of them today.

Firstly we’ve been asked to add other currencies.  Originally we had only a handful but now we support the complete list, from Albanian Lekes to Zimbabwe Dollars and everything in between.

Secondly we’ve added the ability to edit invoices.  It used to be that once you’d entered an invoice you were stuck with it, but now if you need to edit it before it is paid then you can by clicking the new Edit Invoice button.  (Also note that if you originally created the invoice as paid and then you want to edit it then  you can also reverse the payment as normal, which will unpay the invoice, and then edit away).

Lastly, as previously mentioned, we’ve added an Undo facility.  You’ll see now when you post entries that a link saying ‘Undo xyx…’ and clicking that link will immediately undo (by reversing the original journal entry) the change you just made.

Thank you very much to everyone that has been in touch to ask questions or make requests.  We’ve got more features coming soon so keep an eye on the blog for updates.

New temporary VAT rate

Those of you in the U.K. will probably be aware that in his pre-budget report the Chancellor announced that the standard rate of VAT will be reduced to 15% on 1 December 2008.

This means that for any sales of standard-rated goods or services that take place on or after 1 December 2008 providers should charge VAT at the new rate of 15%.

We’ve updated Bionic Books to include this temporary rate and you’ll find it amongst your sales tax options the next time you record a sale or a purchase.

In other Bionic news we’ve been working hard behind the scenes on the hotly anticipated ‘Undo’ functionality, which is why you haven’t heard much from us lately, so expect more on that very soon.

Thanks once again to all of you that have got in touch and given us feedback – we devour everything you say and all of the work we’ve got planned is based on and prioritised by what we hear from you; if there is something you’d really like Bionic Books to do or something that you’d like us to sort out and you haven’t yet, you can get in touch here.

Invoice Numbering – you ask, we do

A new release of Bionic Books this morning, containing something that quite a few people asked for – configurable invoice numbering!  Finally now you can, from the Setup tab, configure an invoice number prefix and a suffix sequence value for the next invoice number.

We’ve also made a few small improvements across the application, including a few visual tweaks so hope you like them too.

Show and Tell

Thanks very much to Ian from Songkick for having us along to Hacker Meetup number 5, where we did the very first public demo of Bionic Books!.  Also presenting was Alex “Million Dollar Homepage” Tew who gave a demo of his new startup, PopJam and the event was attended by a lot of other very interesting people.  Hopefully someone will be able to turn up a photo of me in action – if so I’ll post it up!