It’s been a long time coming, but today finally saw the launch of Amberleaf’s bill tracking for domains and hosting accounts. How to implement billing had been troubling me for a while, but I finally decided to keep it simple.

So, I spun a branch in git and started coding. I gave myself a time limit of 3 days to get something built and released. This proved a useful tool in keeping me focussed. Despite the inevitable “if only it just did this…” going through my mind, pledging my deadline in public helped me to stick to it!

I designed the billing system to simply track income and bills that were due to be paid. No complex invoice generation or sending invoices to clients – that’s better left to specialist tools like Freshbooks or Invoice Machine. The plan is to eventually let Amberleaf interact with these services to generate invoices.

If you’ve got an Amberleaf account, just sign in to see the new billing functionality. If you’ve not yet signed up, Amberleaf is completely free during the beta, so why not register an account to check out the new features? There’ll also be a limited free account once Amberleaf goes live!

I’d love to hear your feedback if you’re using Amberleaf to manage your domains and hosting accounts – you can send feedback directly from Amberleaf using the Send Feedback tab, or tweet @cblunt.

After several months of evening development and jumping into Rails at the deep-end, I’m happy to jump into 2010 by opening public beta accounts for Amberleaf – and every account is free for the duration of the beta!

Amberleaf is built to remind you of upcoming renewals for domains and SSL certificate expiries, and hosting account renewals, and simply to remind you when to bill your customers. It is the evolution of HostManager, an OS X app I wrote back in my university days.

Who uses Amberleaf?

Anybody who has a domain! Whether you own or manage a single domain, or several hundred hosting accounts on behalf of your clients, Amberleaf is designed to make your life easier, by providing:

• Automatic WHOIS lookup for domains, with more TLDs being added.
• Email notification of upcoming expiries and renewals.
• Private RSS feed of your upcoming notifications.
• Simple client management, with the ability to import your existing clients’ vCards.
• Keep a history of notes for your domains and clients, such as when special discounts are due to end.

What do you think?

Amberleaf is completely free for the duration of the beta, and signup only takes a couple of minutes; I’d love to hear your feedback and comments.

Sign up for Amberleaf now or find out more.

If you’ve already signed up, you can email comments to chris at chrisblunt dot com; ping me on twitter (@cblunt), or send feedback directly from Amberleaf using the feedback tab at the bottom of every page.

If you’d like to see what’s coming in future releases, and get involved in Amberleaf’s development, check out the public tracker at trac.chrisblunt.com.