Just realized my invoicing software had a 'schedule send' feature this whole time

I was manually emailing invoices at 9am every Monday for two years... then I saw a calendar icon next to the send button in FreshBooks. Turns out I could have automated the whole thing and saved maybe 10 hours a year. Anyone else find a basic feature in their tool that was hiding in plain sight?

3 comments

3 Comments

zarag173d ago

And the really frustrating part is how often these features are just sitting there in plain sight but camouflaged as decorative icons instead of labeled buttons. FreshBooks is bad about it but honestly most of these software tools do the same thing. They hide the most useful automation behind a little clock icon or a dropdown menu that you'd never think to click unless you already knew what you were looking for. I spent months manually creating recurring invoice templates when QuickBooks had a batch send option buried under two layers of settings. Once you find one of these time savers it makes you wonder what else you're missing. Probably worth poking around your settings menu for an afternoon just to see what other hidden shortcuts are in there.

kim_mason553d ago

Oh man, you hit the nail on the head @zarag17. I actually read a blog post last week about UI/UX design in accounting software and they literally call those hidden features "dark patterns" because theyre designed to trick you into not finding them. Makes me so mad because I bet theres a whole bunch of automation in my software that I'll never stumble across. I spent three hours last month digging through every menu in Xero after a friend told me about a report generator I had no idea existed. Found a bunch of other stuff too, like auto-reminders for overdue payments that were just sitting there unused. Feels like these companies want you to waste time so you think you need their premium plan or something.

the_olivia1d ago

Wait, so I could've been letting my computer do the boring stuff this whole time instead of pretending I'm some kind of invoicing robot? I'm starting to think the real "dark pattern" is just me not reading the screen.