Papilio completed two years at Gurujana!

We are glad to be of service.

Identifying that you have a problem is the first step to solving it.

"Just because you don't know what to do about it, doesn't make it less of a problem."
 - Solving problems (vs. identifying them)

Multiple Accounts in Mulberry

Most of the times, its difficult to guess what your customer needs. We might be able to guess some of the times, but it takes a real knack and a lot of empathy to actually feel the pain. Especially for us who are not chartered accountants, the problem is deeper, since most of our customers are from this fraternity. One such issue has been the need to be able to invoice their customers as multiple companies, sometimes as a consultant and sometimes as a statutory body. We didn't see it initially when Mulberry went out of the door, but as soon as our beta customers started using it they saw it bright as a day.

Changing the underlying data structures is usually a tricky job. And I am glad to report that we have finished this feature to satisfaction. So here comes -
you can now create an invoice under multiple account heads (thats what we call). For those of you, who use Mulberry like a straight forward invoicing app, you will not see any changes (except the logo will not appear in the printable format yet.) If you want to use this feature, go to "Admin > Settings". Look for "Accounts". You can add a new account, or edit the current one.

Importantly, even if you don't use the multiple account feature, you can set a prefix for your invoice numbers and set the sequence number from which you want to start the numbering for your invoices.

Planning a new offering for Papilio

We propose Papilio to firms with more than 10 people, and we do so under the impression that the kind of pain Papilio resolves, appears when you grow beyond 10 in size. Surprisingly, we are getting a lot of requests from small firms which want to use Papilio and bake it into their culture so that when they do grow big, they would have a streamlined process already in place. So we are planning to bring out Papilio in a lighter package at a lower price with not many bells and whistles. We are still working on the details, but your input as always will be invaluable. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below. If you have friends in this category looking to use Papilio and are hesitating because of the price, please let them know and ask them to register.

On a side note, effective 1st Jan 12, the price of Papilio is 200/-, per active user per month and the min. price per month is 2000/-. However, this increase is applicable only to new customers. If you are already using papilio, you don't have to worry. You will always be charged at your current rates.

Introducing Mulberry

Welcome Mulberry!

Mulberry is the quick and easy way to create, send, track all your invoices and remind your customers about payments. With this professionally designed online invoicing software you can easily manage your billing, contacts and payments. Its in beta and as with our policy its free until its in beta for all users.

For those of you who use Papilio, its all the more easier and quicker to create invoices for the services in Papilio. All you need to do, to start using Mulberry is to tick on the checkbox "Use Mulberry" provided  under Admin - Settings tab.

Now when you go to edit the service, there you will be able to see a link called "Raise an Invoice", instead of the previously present link "Add an invoice". Click on this link, and enter all the details to place an invoice request. The details like No.of People, Amount etc. are not required fields. These fields are present to let your accountant know how the invoice should be raised like for what amount, or for what dates etc.

"Raise an Invoice" link shows this form

Your accountant can login to Mulberry (http://mulberry.indygo.in/) and see these invoice requests. To create an account for your accountant within mulberry, please login to mulberry, go to Admin -  and click on 'Add contact'. If you are a user in Papilio with admin rights, your account has been imported into Mulberry by us. So you will need to use the same credentials (email id and password) as Papilio in order to login to Mulberry. Chances are that your accountant might also be in mulberry already if she was a user in Papilio with admin rights.

Going back to invoice requests, your accountant can look at these requests, group them by client, create invoices for them, and send them electronically to your clients, all from a single page. If you requested for an invoice in Papilio, you will receive a copy of the invoice email that was sent to your client.

As a part of this effort, we have imported the clients and their contacts from Papilio to your accounts in Mulberry. So you will have all the information right there. We are in the process of building more integration so that the changes to your clients and contacts in Papilio will be available in Mulberry and viceversa. Please remember, if you change the password in Mulberry it will not change it in Papilio yet and viceversa.

Mulberry is an application that can be used independent of Papilio as well. There is no need that you have to be using Papilio to use Mulberry. So give it a spin, see how you like it and if you feel it will be useful, use it for free (until its in beta), and please help us to shape it to your liking. Also even after its out of beta, its going to be free for small companies.

Some important features of Mulberry -

• In the Overview page, you can send multiple invoices through email by clicking on Send button. When you send invoices, invoice will get attached to the mail as PDF file. If you work with a single invoice, you can choose whom you want to send the invoice from the contact list of your client. In a bulk send option, the email address of your client or its first contact will be picked up automatically and sent.
• Report under Invoices tab lets you see and download all your invoice and billing information.
• When you go to Invoices show page, you have several options to resend invoice, close invoice, invalidate invoice, print invoice and add payments to an invoice.
• Under Clients tab you can see, add or edit all your client information.
• Under Admin Tab you have provision to add the tax details that gets applied to all invoices, upload logo that will appear in your invoices and add general notes that wanted printed in all invoices.
• Configure Reminders from the Admin Tab. There are two kinds of reminders. Those that you would like to send once, like the one that you might want to send to inform your client about the invoice that you just sent. And then those that you want to send to remind them about the payments that are still due. "Until closure" type reminders are sent till the invoice is closed. One email goes out for each invoice. (SMS are currently not functional, but they will be in a short time).

This is "work in progress" and we have a bucket load of features that we are still working on. As always we want to hear from you about our products. So if you have any ideas which will help us improve Mulberry, don't hesitate to click on the "Have an idea?" link at the bottom.

Working with a service

Hello and welcome. This video shows you how to work with a service. (Video length - 3m 21 sec).

Setting a service to repeat automatically