Future of Web Apps, one of our favourite web conferences, comes to the Royal Docks of London this week and I'll be there representing FreeAgent Central and hopefully learning a thing or three too.

This year there are two main tracks — one focusing on the business side of web apps, the other on development — and there are some excellent speakers lined up such as Tim Bray, Mark 'Facebook' Zuckerberg and Kevin 'Digg' Rose. It's good to see a healthy representation of UK speakers too, such as Matt Biddulph, Andy McLoughlin, Richard Moross and Edinburgh's very own Tony Lucas.

If you're going along be sure to say come up and say 'Hi'!

Track Bills

You can now use FreeAgent to track Bills from your Suppliers as well as your own Invoices to Clients.

Bills cover anything you buy for the business but don't need to pay for straightaway.

You can keep track of who you owe, and when they're expecting payment.

When you do pay them, you add a Bank Entry or explanation as a Bill Payment and assign it to that bill.

When you create a bill you can enter both a Bill Date and a Due Date, assign it to a Contact and specify the Type (like you would with Expenses or Bank Entries).

Bills can also have attachments - handy for storing those scanned or PDF versions of the originals.

And of course Bills are comprehensively handled by our accounting engine, including the sales tax or for our UK users all the various flavours of VAT.

Soon we'll be adding an Overview panel for Open and Overdue Bills and after that we'll also be starting to pull together our Invoice, Tax and Bills timelines in cool ways. Nice.

Clients become Contacts

As you'll notice from above, you can now manage both Suppliers and Clients.

In FreeAgent these are now collectively called Contacts, and we've updated FreeAgent to allow you to choose from a new Card view as well as the existing List view.

We've also updated the main page for each Contact to show all the Invoices, Invoice Receipts, Bills and Bill Payments in a single Account History.

Streamline and Simplify

In the recent months we've been adding quite a lot of new features to FreeAgent to make sure you have all the tools you need to manage your business as a freelancer.

But we appreciate the way they're currently organized may not be the best. Too many Tabs.

So the team are thinking really hard about how we can re-organize things to streamline and simplify FreeAgent, based on the ways you really work, and you'll start to see the results of that in the coming weeks.

Don't forget you can have your say on this topic, on Bills, Contacts - or anything else that's on your mind - at our Customer Service site Get Satisfaction

Look forward to seeing you there!

Tweaks

This week we have also:

• Added those sweet traffic lights to the invoices listed on on the Overview panel.
• Fixed an issue where Universal accounts could sometimes see UK Payroll screens, leading to errors.
• Fixed a problem caused by FreeAgent not storing timeslip hours accurately enough when entered as [hh:mm].
• Made some large improvements under-the-hood to our accounting engine to enhance performance.
• Fixed an issue where the Overview Mini-P&L panel showed retained profit with the wrong sign.

Best wishes,

Ed & The Team at FreeAgent Central.

A few small improvements this week - we've also been busy laying the groundwork for some very cool stuff coming soon.

Do More with Attachments

As well as attaching electronic receipts to your out-of-pocket expenses, you can now attach them to your mileage claims and bank account entries/explanations.

As with out-of-pocket expenses, you do this when you're adding or editing the relevant item, and the presence of an attachment is marked by a paperclip in the item lists.

We now support an optional text description for each attachment, and you can also now attach multi-page PDFs, with FreeAgent showing you a thumbnail of the first page as a preview.

Links to Invoice Payments

FreeAgent now lists the payments that have been made on each invoice, and you can click through from the invoice itself to view,edit or delete them.

On the downloaded or emailed PDF versions of the invoices, these appear as regular text rather as than as underlined links.

Editing Custom Invoice Templates

You can now edit the formatting of your custom invoice templates from within FreeAgent, via a new Invoices > My Template screen.

Note that this is currently only available to users of our Invoice Devkit (get in touch if you want to do this).

We'll soon be allowing the rest of us mere mortals to do invoice template tweaking too, so if you're determined to have a version of Bauhaus with cobalt text on cerise-shaded background, you can do just that!

Staying up-to-date via Twitter

We're using an cool online service called Twitter to post updates, breaking news, and service availability announcements about the FreeAgent application.

Follow us via our Twitter account freeagentapp to stay utterly up-to-date.

Other Little Stuff

This week we have:

• Added a Capital account for Stock - only visible from the Journal Entry interface, if you really must handle real products!
• Fixed an issue where changes made to invoice receipt bank account entries could make the invoices unviewable. Ouch.
• Fixed a problem where editing a bank account explanation would not correctly alter the transaction unexplained amount.

Coming Next: Bills

In our next release we'll be introducing support, at last, for Bills.

So as well as working out who owes you money, you can keep track of who you owe.

Ta-ra until then,

Ed & The Team at FreeAgent Central.