Rocket (8.0) brings a new Invoice Line Item Management and More

Rocket, the latest version of Sprout Invoices (8.0) has been released into the wild; with it came improved management, some nice new features, and a few big changes.

Line Item Types

Sprout Invoices now supports multiple types of line items, and developers can easily create new line item types with a few filters ¹. Below you can see not only how easy it will be to add these new line item types but how each line item can have it’s own set of columns, i.e. a product has price and quantity vs. time with hours and rate.

As you can tell the UI has received a revamped UI, the goals for the new UI:

1. Allow for line items to be moved around the list more easily, including allowing them to be nested and un-nested without any hassles.
2. Line item copying. A new feature that has been added above the line item removal control to the left of each item.
3. More compact view to allow for more line item columns.
4. Speed. AJAX to dynamically insert lien items is now used and with some code improvements the difference in speed is negligible and could be perceived as fast.

There were a lot of internal code changes that made this new functionality happen. A lot of code was discarded, re-written, and newly developed with the focus on future expansion. Allowing for new add-ons (or customizations) to be created without the hassle previous versions forced.

Pre-defined Line Item Updated

As you’d expect the new line item types forced some add-ons to be updated, otherwise they simply would work. Pre-defined Line Items was one of those add-ons that needed a lot work for Rocket. During the development though I took the opportunity to add a few things that users (including myself) have been waiting for.

The first change you’ll notice is the ability to search through all the pre-defined items, sorted now my type.

If you’re not new to pre-defined items than this feature might go over-looked but pre-defined items can now be edited, instead of deleted and re-created. Hopefully those who’ve been waiting patiently for this feature can forgive me for not including it in the initial release ?.

Admin Filtering

A could new admin features were added with Rocket. The first is Invoices (and Estimates) filtering by due dates and assigned clients from the admin list. The video below shows how easy and useful it is.

Bulk Send Invoices

Bulk sending invoices (and estimates) has been one of those most requested features that was never imagined. Luckily for those license holders with priority feature requests pushed for a feature that now everyone can benefit from.

Rocket Offers More

Rocket (v.8.0) offers a lot more, including: a beta version of the JSON API, code improvements, new hooks and filters, and the new add-ons. Those new add-ons will be released this week.