Database Exporting/Backup Tool
Corduroy now features an on-demand database backup and data exporting tool that allows your site's administrative users to download raw data from your Corduroy database.
Each database table selected will be exported into a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file, and then archived in a single zip file to download. This data can be imported into data manipulation tools such as Microsoft Excel to run your own analysis and graphs, or just backed up with your other data as an additional security measure.
To access this tool, administrative users can click on the Administration link in the upper right corner, then click on Export Data/backup in the upper right. Select the tables you wish to export and click Export Data. After your data is extracted and processed, your browser will ask you to save a zip file.
Of course, we stress that these archives should be preserved in a secure location once downloaded. Your entire Corduroy site can be contained in them and may contain your customer information, credit card numbers (on downloaded bank transactions), and other proprietary information. We encourage you to store them on encrypted disks with tools like PGP for Windows, or Knox for Mac.
In the future we hope to expand this tool to support the importation of these backups, as well as importing data from other sources to assist new companies in migrating to Corduroy.
We would love to hear your feedback on this backup tool and Corduroy in general. Drop us an e-mail or leave a comment here on our weblog.
Bank Updates
Corduroy has recently improved its online banking support to allow fetching transactions and balances from more banking institutions.
In particular, a recent change made by Chase Bank resulted in the inability to fetch transactions from linked Chase accounts. Their new server information has been updated in Corduroy and should be working again for Chase customers.
An internal change has been also been made to improve compatibility with banks such as Bank of America that only support direct account access with certain software such as QuickBooks.
If you experience issues fetching linked bank account transactions or you wish to link to a bank not listed in the "New Bank Account" screen, please use the Help link while logged into your Corduroy account for technical support.
Corduroy Mobile on the iPhone and Android
With the new Corduroy Mobile, you will be able to easily view customer information on the go, including quick links to dial customer phone numbers and get directions to their location with your phone's integrated map application. Create an invoice and e-mail it, or even receive a credit card payment, all while at your customer's location.
Corduroy Mobile is being developed for and tested on the Apple iPhone and Android platforms. There will be no application to install or settings to change, you will simply be directed to the Corduroy Mobile site when visiting your Corduroy site on these mobile devices.
We will be bringing you more information about Corduroy Mobile as development progresses. We hope you will find it as useful as we do in making Corduroy your complete small business billing system.
Network Outage
All Corduroy sites were intermittently unreachable this afternoon from between 10:36am and 12:09pm Central time. According to our network provider, a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on another customer was causing these network availability issues, and the attack has been blocked.
We have taken this opportunity to move the Corduroy weblog to another server outside of the network that hosts the Corduroy sites. In the event of any future large-scale outages affecting all of our Corduroy users, this weblog will be reachable and will provide real-time status updates. We encourage users to take a moment and subscribe to the RSS feed to receive future updates.
We apologize for any inconvenience this outage may have caused our Corduroy users.
OFX File Support
While Corduroy has always had support for importing bank account transactions from Quicken QIF files, some bank websites do not support this file format and only export into OFX format.
As of today, Corduroy now supports the upload of these OFX files for transaction history. In addition, transactions imported from OFX and QIF files now use the same style of importing as live, Internet updates. This means users can import a month of transactions each time and all previously imported transactions will be matched and cancelled out, leaving only new transactions to be imported.
We hope you find these new features useful in managing your business finances. If you have any feature requests, please don't hesitate to contact us!
Multi-page Invoices and Statements
For invoices with many line items, Corduroy will now split the invoice PDF into as many pages as needed to present each line item without overlapping any text.
In response to a customer request, we are also working on statement PDFs that can be generated and sent to customers with outstanding invoices. These statements will look similar to invoices but include summaries of each outstanding invoice and give a total outstanding balance. We will update this weblog when this feature has been implemented and tested.