What’s new

Occasionally, you’ll have a client who can’t manage to click a link, or their company’s firewall won’t allow Cushion’s impressive in.vc short URL. For these tricky scenarios, it would be best to send the invoice with a PDF attachment for good measure. Well, now that’s possible—with invoice PDF attachments!

When you go to send an invoice, you’ll now see a checkbox to include the invoice PDF as an attachment. Checking that box is all you need to do! It’ll take an extra second or two to send the email because of the PDF rendering, but your client should have no problem viewing and paying your invoice on time from here on out… right?

Payment isn’t always guaranteed in the freelance life. Sometimes a client will ghost you or go out of business, leaving you with an unpaid invoice that haunts you. It doesn’t feel right to delete it, but you no longer want to factor it towards your potential income. What do you do? That’s where uncollectible invoices come in.

In the invoice status dropdown menu, you’ll now see an option for “Uncollectible”. Marking an invoice as uncollectible will remove it from your potential income, put the invoice in its own “Uncollectible” list, and slap a badge on it for good measure. This way, you can leave it in the past, but still know it’s there for reference. Hopefully, you never to use this feature!

While I often receive feature requests from users, I also have feature requests of my own since I freelance as well, and I’m a very active Cushion user myself. When fixed-rate projects wrap up, I’m left wondering how well I estimated—did I end up making more or less than if I charged a time-based rate. With this in mind, I’m introducing a simple yet powerful feature—effective hourly rates!

Now, when you click into a project you tracked time for, you’ll see your “effective hourly rate” for that project. While the math for this rate is simple (your income for the project divided by your tracked time), it’s still incredibly useful to see at-a-glance. And, if you already have an hourly rate specified, even if you don’t bill hourly, Cushion will compare the two rates.

Going forward, there’s so much more we can do along this line of thinking. Imagine tracking your effective hourly rate over time to help you estimate better, or highlighting clients who should have a higher rate because you end up working overtime on every project. This is just the beginning. Excited? Me too!