Over recent months we have been rolling out a new style guide for Clear Books.

The reason we are doing this is to ensure a modern and consistent approach to layout, colours, icons, grids and fonts that is more accessible on the web and via tablets.

Although many pages and features have had the new style applied to them, this week a highly used page underwent the design update, the create invoice page.

To reduce the impact of change we have been putting new pages in Preview for 30 days so customers have time to try new pages or features and switch back to the old approach if needed.

A lot of the feedback we have received from customers regarding the create invoice page has been received after the new page came out of Preview on Monday. Clearly, this is the wrong way round and we have learned that we need to do a lot more to raise the awareness of items in Preview to get your feedback before we release new pages out. This is something we will do next time we launch a page or feature in Preview.

We have had some really excellent feedback from our customers to improve the create invoice page and are doing our best to work through these.

Since yesterday, based on your input, we have:

1. Moved product items to be the first dropdown in the item details

2. Made the summary text box visible by default to reduce an extra click

3. Reduced whitespace by putting the invoice theme dropdown in line with other dropdowns

We are immediately looking to:

1. Not remember the last customer invoiced

2. Improve the contact dropdowns to combine scrolling through a list and search depending on number of contacts

3. Add email status to Purchase order and sales order lists

We are also listening to the rest of your feedback but the above is the priority.

Posted by Tim Fouracre

Tim founded Clear Books in 2008. Like many small business owners he worked from home for 15 months to get his startup off the ground. Today Tim enjoys helping Clear Books, its customers and its growing team innovate and achieve. Tim did his GCE O Levels in Ghana.