New in Timen: invoice templates, your logo and local formats

What you see is what the client gets

Open an invoice and you are looking at the PDF you are about to send. The customer's address sits where the layout prints it, so does your company block, so do the dates, and you type into each one in place. There is no separate preview to check and no form that rearranges itself into something else on export.

The choices live behind one Design button in the invoice toolbar, on new invoices as well as saved ones. Pick a layout and the invoice redraws in it on the spot, keeping anything you had typed but not saved yet.

Which layout should you pick?

Whichever reads right for your clients. They all carry the same information and the same line items, so the choice is about tone rather than features. Here is the same invoice in all ten:

• Classic is the design Timen always had, and still the default. Nothing changes until someone picks another.
• Letterhead reads like a letter: your name across the top, a serif heading.
• Statement puts the amount due first, the way a utility bill does.
• Ledger draws everything in ruled boxes, numbers each line and totals the hours.
• Block opens with a band in your colour carrying the dates and the amount.
• Margin keeps who and how to pay in a side column, leaving the lines the full width.
• Minimal is one typeface and a lot of white space.
• Poster sets INVOICE and the total in large condensed type.
• Compact fits the most lines on a page and adds each line's date, for long invoices.
• Columns sets every label in its own grey column beside the value, with payment terms such as "Net 30" after the due date.

An invoice that runs past one page behaves in all of them: the column headings repeat at the top of the next page, and the totals never split across two.

Your logo, your colour, your font

To add a logo, drop the file on the logo spot of any invoice, or click the spot to choose one. PNG, JPEG, SVG and WebP all work, up to 1 MB. It is the team's logo, so it appears on every invoice from then on, and hovering over it gives you a button to take it off again.

Eight of the layouts take an accent colour. There are six ready-made swatches, and the last circle opens your system's colour picker for any colour at all, your brand colour included. Text that sits on the colour switches between white and near-black on its own, so a pale yellow does not leave white writing nobody can read. Classic and Columns stay black and grey on purpose.

Each layout comes with three fonts chosen for it, plus five familiar ones available in all of them: Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato and Merriweather. The font travels inside the PDF, so the invoice looks the same on your client's screen as on yours, whatever they have installed. Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, IBM Plex and Source Sans also cover Cyrillic and Greek, which matters for a client whose name is not written in Latin letters.

Numbers and dates the way your clients read them

A Design menu setting called Region now decides how the numbers look. Set it to the country you work from and the invoice follows that country's conventions: whether the decimal mark is a point or a comma, how thousands are grouped, which side of the amount the currency symbol goes, and in which order the day and month come.

The language is a separate setting, and it only decides the words: English, German, French or Spanish for the labels and the month names, whatever language you use Timen in yourself. So a business in Germany can send a client in London an English invoice that still writes 3.573,00 €.

The region also picks the paper. Invoices from the United States, Canada and Mexico come out on Letter and everyone else's on A4, until you choose a size yourself. In Australia and New Zealand an invoice that charges tax is titled "Tax invoice", as clients there expect. If nobody has set a region, Timen guesses one from the team owner's time zone.

Set it once for the whole team

Everything in the Design menu belongs to the team, not to the person who clicked it. When one person sets up the layout, logo and colour, every invoice anyone on the team raises uses them, and anyone allowed to manage invoices can change them.

Your company and bank details moved the same way. They used to be saved separately for each person, which is how a team ended up with three slightly different addresses on its invoices. They are now one set per team, still typed straight onto the invoice. Nothing was lost in the move: each team took its owner's details, and where the owner had never filled them in, the details of the colleague who raised invoices most recently.

One thing to know before you try out the layouts: a design change applies to every invoice, including ones you have already sent. The PDF your client received does not change, but downloading that invoice again gives you the new look.