- INVOICING - This is rather difficult in Zoho Books and unintuitive. I am forced to go into my time sheets and look for uninvoiced items. But I can't create an invoice from there... I have to go back, and click on projects to find the corresponding project, THEN click the invoice button. The workflow is convoluted. I should be able to go to a single screen, see outstanding/uninvoiced items and be able to create an invoice from there.
- TIMESHEETS - I have a ton of timesheets and the list is getting longer. I don't want to delete them... that would be CRAZY! I want to have views of my timesheets that show uninvoiced items by default. That way I can keep the timesheets manageable. As it stands now I have a huge mess on my hands.
- INVOICES - This part of Zoho Books took me a long time to figure out, and it is still difficult to use, even after I understand it. There are several problems.
- Date - It should default to something that makes sense, rather than today. Most people do their invoicing sometime in the first week of the month, and it is for the previous month. But I always have to manually set the invoice date and it gets annoying.
- Invoice Item Grouping - I suspect most of your customers will want to group this by task and not project... but it is ALWAYS set to project. At the very least you could have Zoho Books remember my preference.
- Invoice Item Description - This is quite confusing at first and requires multiple back and forth attempts to get the invoice to look right. BUT, Zoho does not support forward and backward clicks here, so if you are unhappy with your selection here and hit back button you are screwed and get kicked back farther than you wanted to go and you'll have to start all over again. Of course you have the helpful little "Click here to see what your invoice will look like" link... but it doesn't actually show you what YOUR invoice will look like, so in practice it is not helpful. To fix this, either a) show what YOUR invoice will look like, or support the back button, or both... preferably both.
- Emailing Invoices - This is important. After creating an invoice you should actually deliver it to the customer... but this is not part of the workflow. It is just presented as an afterthought in the sidebar. More than once I have created invoices and not delivered them to the customer. Doh! Please make this CRITICAL part of the workflow actually part of the workflow.
- PROJECTS - This page is hard to read because the columns are in the wrong order. Logically it should be client, project, task. Here is why: most of my projects will have similar names, like SEM Marketing. So that first column is pretty useless unless it is preceded by the client's name.
- TIMESHEET - This page is impossible to use as-is. Where do I start?
- Which project is which? My projects usually have similar names, like SEM Marketing. There is nothing on this page that tells me which client's SEM Marketing project is which! They all look exactly the same.
- Change project name. OK, so if I can't tell which project is which, I guess I'll have to rename them to include the client's name... but Oh wait. Zoho Doesn't support that. I can't change a project name. So I am stuck with a timesheet page that can't be made useable.
- Log Time - When I need to log time, I click the Log Time button. It makes me select from a dropdown menu of projects... but I can't tell which is which because the names are all similar.
- I realize now, after a few months that my projects should include the client's name, even though it is kind of ridiculous and redundant to do so. But still, I forget to do it because it is just counter-intuitive. This problem just gets worse and worse as I add more projects and tasks and it won't be long before I can't use it at all.
- PREPAYMENTS - Perhaps this is possible with Zoho Books, but I haven't figured it out... I have a client that prepaid me $500 for an hourly job. How can I record that payment, and have it apply to future invoices?
That's about it. Other than these annoyances, I like the product. Keep up the good work.