VoxSciences turns your voicemails into emails

I've been looking for a while for a way to get Skype voicemails sent to me by email. Listening to voicemails is time consuming and fiddly. Skype's iPhone client for some reason often fails to play voicemails, so I have to login from a PC to get a voicemail. Then I have to actually listen to it to find out what it is about and how urgent / important it is.

I tried SpinVox via Skype, but I found that was unreliable (three voicemails in one day were totally ignored by SpinVox, no notification and no transcription. I only found them by logging in to Skype from a PC). And SpinVox only sends them as a text, not an email. Voicemails are usually important, but are rarely so urgent they need to be texted.

I found another service called VoxSciences, and it seems to work really well. It does two things which SpinVox doesn't:

1. Sends transcript by email
2. Attaches an MP3 of the voicemail to an email (so if the transcription is uncertain, I can easily listen to the original recording myself)

(Works with any telephone / VOIP, just forward unanswered calls to your VoxSciences voicemailbox and caller can leave a message which will be transcribed.)

Costs £5 for every 30 messages (with minimum fee of £5/ month).

I've no relationship with VoxSciences, but I'd highly recommend them to anyone who wants their voicemails transcribed and emailed to them.

www.voxsci.com

Printing numbered raffle tickets is harder than it sounds

I spent the best part of an afternoon last week battling with Microsoft Office to print 500 raffle tickets for our local playgroup fundraising.

You'd think it's easy, right? Create one ticket in Word, do a simple mail merge to pull in 500 numbers, then merge to printer.

But it is really hard (in fact, I think it is not possible) to get Word to print several differently-numbered tickets on one sheet of paper.

Anyway, to save anyone else that pain, I wrote a whole blog post explaining how I eventually did it. And I even set up a whole new blog, just for that post, to make it as easy as possible for fellow raffle-ticket-printers to find it:

Instructions for creating and printing numbered raffle tickets on your own printer.

Send invoices via InvoiceHub so your clients don't have to rekey your invoice into their accounts software

I have a new project called InvoiceHub.

InvoiceHub accepts invoices, via email, from anyone. It extracts key data (invoice number, amount, etc.) from the invoice. Then it forwards the original to its intended recipient with a link inserted in the email to allow the recipient to view the extracted data, and zap it straight into their accounts software.

Here's an example:

Let's say I'm creating an invoice to send to a client. It doesn't much matter what software I use to create the invoice, as long as that software can produce a PDF which I can email to my client. Here's me creating an invoice in Xero. I'm invoicing a client called Eskimo Joe, for some supplies of ice:

I email that invoice, from Xero, to my client, Eskimo Joe:

His email address is eskimojoe@gmail.com. But rather than send it direct to his email address, I send it via InvoiceHub, to eskimojoe+gmail.com@invoice-hub.com.

When Eskimo Joe checks his email, he gets an email that looks pretty much as if I sent it direct to him. It has my invoice, and my text, and comes from me:

But, actually, it's already been through the InvoiceHub system, and InvoiceHub has already extracted the data from the invoice, ready for Eskimo Joe to import into his accounts software. Look at the link at the top of the email:

That link has been inserted into the email by InvoiceHub. The beauty of it is, though, that if Eskimo Joe doesn't care much for automagically importing stuff into his accounts software, he can just ignore that link and open the regular PDF attachment. But if Eskimo Joe clicks the link, this is what he'll see:

My invoice on the left, with key data (invoice number, date and so on) already extracted. All Eskimo Joe has to do is give InvoiceHub permission to import this invoice into his accounts system. Let's say Eskimo Joe uses KashFlow. He pops his KashFlow username and password on the screen here and InvoiceHub fetches his list of suppliers and account codes, so Eskimo Joe can say where he wants this invoice to go:

Then he clicks "Import to KashFlow". That's all he needs to do. When he later looks in his KashFlow account, the invoice will be already there:

Neither I nor my client needed to set up anything in advance. All I did was send the invoice to eskimojoe+gmail.com@invoice-hub.com instead of eskimojoe@gmail.com. Try it yourself, and let me know what you think. Is this a useful tool? Or just a solution looking for a problem?

Why are XML invoices not commonplace?

I'm quite intrigued by the idea of being able to send and receive invoices electronically. Big corporates have been exchanging purchase orders and invoices electronically for decades, but almost no SMEs do this (except for those who are required to, in order to bill their big corporate clients. But often that doesn't work out so well.)

On the face of it, it should be quite simple to include an XML version of your invoice in some standard format which any accounting software can read. Pretty much everyone is using accounting software to create invoices, but they then flatten that data by printing or emailing a PDF, only for the recipient to have to painstakingly type it all back into their software. Would be better if they could just have the raw data go straight into their accounts software, without any need to retype it.

I stumbled across one attempt to create a standard for this kind of invoice data exchange, called SimpleUBL. "UBL" is "universal business language", which looks like a horrendously complex standard for exchanging all sorts of business process information. SimpleUBL is trying to make that simpler. But it still ain't simple as in iPhone. Browsing through it, I'm seeing hundreds of "Common Aggregate Components", things like:

PlacardEndorsementType

OwnerTypeCodeType

LongitudeMinutesMeasureType

Does that stuff really need to be in a standard used by SMEs for exchanging invoices?

And the whole point of XML is that it is supposed to be human-readable, but even something as simple as displaying amount before tax and amount after tax is a little cumbersome in SimpleUBL:



<cac:LegalTotal>
 <cbc:LineExtensionTotalAmount amountCurrencyCodeListVersionID="0.3"amountCurrencyID="USD">479.50</cbc:LineExtensionTotalAmount>
 <cbc:TaxExclusiveTotalAmount amountCurrencyCodeListVersionID="0.3"amountCurrencyID="USD">479.50</cbc:TaxExclusiveTotalAmount>
 <cbc:TaxInclusiveTotalAmount amountCurrencyCodeListVersionID="0.3"amountCurrencyID="USD">527.45</cbc:TaxInclusiveTotalAmount>
 </cac:LegalTotal>



Seems to me that it could be a lot simpler still, and still be useful for the majority of businesses, and be much easier to implement.

If you are actually typing details from a supplier's invoice into your accounts software, the key things you type in are the invoice number, the date, and the amount. If you are VAT registered, then you’ll also be splitting out the total before and total after VAT. So the absolute minimum you need would be something like this:


<Invoice> <InvoiceNumber>10011</InvoiceNumber> <InvoiceDate>2011-10-12</InvoiceDate> <AmountBeforeTax>100.00</AmountBeforeTax> <Tax>20.00</Tax> <AmountAfterTax>120.00</AmountAfterTax> </Invoice>


But you also need to record who the invoice is from and what it’s for. That’s a little trickier for the person creating the invoice to include usefully in their XML, because they don't know how they are represented in your accounts system, and they have no idea what your chart of accounts looks like. You might put a phone bill under “Office Overhead”, “Phone, Internet, Power”, or “Rent etc.”



Nevertheless, that information has to appear in the invoice, so your bare-bones XML invoice might start to look like this:



<Invoice>
<From>British Telecom plc</From>
<To>Fictitious Startup Ltd</To>
<Description>Telephone service</Description>
<InvoiceNumber>10011</InvoiceNumber>
<InvoiceDate>2011-10-12</InvoiceDate>
<AmountBeforeTax>100.00</AmountBeforeTax>
<Tax>20.00</Tax>
<AmountAfterTax>120.00</AmountAfterTax>
</Invoice>

I think in the UK you have to show the VAT % as well as the VAT amount, and there are probably other bits and bobs I haven't thought of, particularly where there are several different items on one invoice.

But my point is it just doesn't seem that hard.

Seems a little surprising that we are still having to email PDFs to each other rather than sending raw data. Is there a business here? Some kind of hub which accepts an invoice in any format, converts it to XML and zaps it over to the recipient's accounts software? Maybe.

Where are the cuts?

So, erm, where are all the spending cuts everyone is talking about?

Couple of big chunks out of Transport, Local Government and Business adding up to about £8bn (about 1% of total national expenditure) But the big things people really care about (NHS, schools, police) are either flat or increasing. And total expenditure is broadly flat.

And look at Treasury: £13bn of money in from interventions in the financial markets. (Not sure what % return on capital that represents, though). No one seems to have mentioned that when talking about bank bail-outs.

(Click the image to get the full interactive chart from the Guardian.)

What's with the crappy-looking payroll add-ons for Xero?

I'm looking to add Payroll to my Xero account. Xero, if you are not familiar with it, is web-based accounting software. It looks gorgeous, super slick and easy to use and for Sage-haters like me is a godsend:

Then I look at their approved Payroll services (that apparently integrate with Xero). Here's one:

Bejesus! Scrolling text, animated "Only £1" thingymajig. Honestly looks like some student built this c. 1996. If their marketing site is that awful, is the interface going to be similar? Am I going to be trawling through dozens of ugly, hard-to-read screens to process each employee?

How about this one. No pricing information, and I've got to fill out 20 fields just to sign up:

And more of the same:

 But it gets worse. The Payroll Site above, doesn't actually integrate with Xero at all. They make you dump a .CSV file and import it:
(Update 23 Jan: The Payroll Site apparently now have proper API integration, see comment from them below)

FFS.

Xero, what's going on? Lots of businesses have, like, employees. Can we have a payroll function that looks reassuringly like it will actually work, please?

I'd sooner lose my right arm than take on HostelWorld's lawyers

HostelWorld have taken exception to our logo on KeepMeBooked, claiming it is too similar to theirs and will cause confusion in the marketplace.

Spot the difference:

They have basically taken the internationally recognised symbol for lodging and made a bunk bed out of it. We've taken the internationally recognised symbol for lodging and, erm, added the words "KeepMeBooked" to it.

Our logo is a registered trademark, but they have scarier lawyers than we do, so we caved in and chopped off our man's right arm. Our logo now looks like this:

This has been rumbling away since April, when HostelWorld sent us an aggressive (verging on rude) cease-and-desist-or-we'll-eat-you-for-breakfast letter. I'm sure if they'd just sent a polite email, we could have resolved it much quicker. But, hey, life's too short to teach lawyers to be good-natured and amiable.