Early this morning we pushed out a new release affectionately dubbed “Animal House”. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new:

Tax management for your expenses

Now you have the ability to add taxes to your expense categories. The benefit of this is that once you set the taxes you want to associate with a given category, all you need to do is enter an expense total and we will backwards calculate the amount of tax on the expense for you. This will come in handy at tax time - especially for UK and Canadian based companies.

Staff time-tracking via the API

When we first released our Mac OS X time tracking widget, only admin accounts were supported. Now your staff can join the party with their very own API token. Here are the steps they’ll need to retrieve their token and get rolling:

1. Login.
2. Go to the “Profile” link in the top right hand corner.
3. At the bottom of the page, collect your URL and token.
4. Input these values into the widget.

Note: You (as the administrator) must have enabled the API in your account and agreed to the API terms of service before your staff can retrieve their token. But if you are already using the widget or another FreshBooks add-on, you’re good to go already.

There are other additions to the API relating to projects, credits and some other goodies. Check the developer blog for those details a little later today.

Improved “Assign Client” page

We’ve made the “Assign Client” page easier to use, which is great news for accounts juggling permissions between clients and staff.

More e-mail customizations

In this release we also added the ability to further customize your emails. You can now include invoice/estimate numbers and amounts in the body of emails sent to your clients.

So, that wraps things up. We’ll be sending an email around with this info later this morning.