What's new at Fanurio

The latest news about product updates and everything else related to Fanurio.

Fanurio 2.5 Released

February 28, 2012

Version 2.5 is now officially released. You can get it from the download page. Unlike previous releases, this one can't be used by all users but only by those with a valid annual maintenance plan. Go to the About window to see when your plan expires.

  • If it expires sometime in the future, then you can use version 2.5.

  • If it already expired, you can either renew your annual maintenance plan so you can use version 2.5 or you can download version 2.4.4 that we've also released today. Bug fixes are free for your version even if your annual maintenance plan has expired.

Now, let's see some of the new features and improvements from this version. Most of them focus on billing and on the user interface.

Memory leaks

Fanurio was sometimes slow, very slow, especially when it ran for days. Our investigations showed that this happened because of some memory leaks. This means that Fanurio was consuming more and more memory as it was running. Everytime a project was opened, the timer was stopped or an invoice was exported, memory was used and never released. This was a major problem in all previous releases, so we decided to also include this fix in the 2.4.4 release so everybody can benefit from it.

Besides from our leaks, we also fixed a memory leak introduced by Apple in Java 1.6.0_29 running on Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.6.

Products

The product is a new type of item that is meant to complement services. It is necessary for people who need to bill goods but it's also going to help us in the future to introduce new features like date range invoices and estimates.

Although you can use service items to bill both work and materials, it doesn't feel right to create a service item to bill goods. For instance, if you have a small IT shop and you need to charge a client for 2 computers, creating a service item is a little strange because selling 2 computers is not actually a service. You can now use services to bill work performed for the client and products to bill materials, equipment or anything else that doesn't involve actual work.

You should also use products when you want to sell or resell goods. If you are reselling goods, the new Markup link located next to the Cost field will help you set the price easier. Let's say you want to resell a computer with a 10% markup. Open a project and create a product item. Then enter how much you paid for it in the Cost field, click the Markup link, enter 10% and the Price will be calculated automatically.

If you start using product items to bill goods, your invoice may not display them because your current template doesn't know about products. It would be very complicated to migrate all templates automatically so you have three options.

  1. Use the new template editor to recreate existing templates (see below)
  2. Change existing templates manually
  3. Contact us to help you fix existing templates for free

Business catalog

The business catalog is not a new feature but an old one with a new name that makes more sense. As a business, you probably have a list of services and goods that you sell to all your clients. The business catalog allows you to build this list so you can keep everything organized in one place. Once you build your catalog, you can use catalog items to create project items easier.

In previous versions the business catalog was found under Business > My Business Details > Services and Rates but now it can be found under Business > My Business Details > Catalog. The old name for catalog items was item categories. As a result of this change, some templates may not work because the item.itemCategory placeholder was renamed to item.catalogItem. To fix your templates, you have the same three options.

  1. Use the new template editor to recreate existing templates (see below)
  2. Change existing templates manually
  3. Contact us to help you fix existing templates for free

Template editor

Up until now, Fanurio was able to create new templates but once a template was created it couldn't be edited from the application, it had to be changed from outside the application. The new template editor can create and edit templates. The editor cannot open existing templates but they can be recreated quite easily.

The nice thing about this feature is that you can view an invoice and if you don't like how it looks, you just open the editor to edit the template.

We finally have a tool that allows us to build the template library everybody has asked for a long time.

Timesheet filters

One of the user interface changes that you will find very practical is the new timesheet filters. You can now filter time entries by client (active or not active), project (finished or not finished) or service (invoiced or not invoiced) status.

The new filters allow you to see time entries for "active clients with unfinished projects and uninvoiced service items" but you could also set the filters to display time for "last month" or "this month". Switching between any of these filter configurations means that you have to adjust each filter individually. To make things easier, you can now save filters and give the configuration a name. Just click the small cog icon from the filters area (on the right) to save them or use one of previously saved configurations.

Czech, Italian and French translations

We've added three more translations for Czech, French and Italian. This means Fanurio can now be used in 9 languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.

There are many other small features and improvements that are not covered by this post but are documented in the change log.