63 pull requests merged across 5 repos last week. Two launches, both on Sunday... which wasn't the plan, but here we are. Here's the week.
Mortar: invoicing and payments, rebuilt around how studios bill
Interior designers don't bill like everyone else.
There's a deposit up front. Then things get ordered, arrive, get installed... and the balance gets billed against all of that. Generic invoicing tools assume you send one invoice for one job and wait. So designers end up running billing in a spreadsheet next to their project tool, and hoping the two agree.
On Sunday 2 Aug, Mortar's whole billing layer went out, built around the way studios actually work.
Deposit up front, balance on delivery. Raise a deposit invoice as a percentage or a fixed amount. Once it's paid, apply it to the balance invoice and Mortar adds the credit line, with the tax handled for you.
Bill straight from procurement. Every item now shows its billing status. Select a room's approved items, or everything that's been received, and generate an invoice in two clicks. It won't let you bill the same item twice.
Get paid without chasing. Automatic reminders go out before and after the due date, written warm, always stating what's currently owed. Turn them on studio-wide or pause them on a single invoice.
Card or bank transfer in the portal. Invoice emails link straight to the client portal pay page. Clients pay by card or bank transfer (US ACH and AU BECS) through your own connected Stripe account, and online payments only ever charge what's still owed.
Offline payments count too. Record a bank transfer, cheque or cash payment against an invoice, in full or in part, and edit or void it later if you need to. There's no Mortar transaction fee on those.
Client statements. A per-client account view (invoiced, paid, outstanding, deposits held) with a branded PDF statement for any date range. It's something the studio generates and shares, not another login for the client.
And the everyday stuff you'd expect: edit a draft's lines, dates and notes without voiding it, a proper detail page for every invoice with its payment history, choose recipients and add a personal note with a live preview before you send, and a searchable, sortable invoice list you can filter by client or search in plain language.
Twelve pieces of work, one week. It's one of the biggest things we've shipped in Mortar so far.
→ Billing and payments · procurement · client portal → Free: interior design budget template → Try Mortar free
Handl: now in Slack, for everyone
The Slack agent has been built since June. We held the launch until everything around it was ready... and on Sunday it went live for everyone.
DM the Handl bot or @mention it in a channel and it does what it does in the dashboard. Create projects, send invoices, chase late payers, answer "who owes us money?" Drop a signed proposal in the thread, say "set this up", and it reads the PDF and builds the project. Approve an invoice from a button in Slack without opening a tab.
The agent itself got a new brain the same day. It's now on Gemini 3.5 Flash, went through a real-world use-case test suite before shipping, and has 129 tools. Basically everything you can do in the app, by asking.
Two agent additions this week too:
- Answers grouped by client. Ask for more than a handful of invoices, payments or projects and they come back grouped by client, overdue first, with subtotals per currency. Currencies are never added together.
- Cost breakdowns. Ask what a project, a category or a team member has cost over any period, labour and expenses included.
Also shipped in Handl this week:
- Client statements. Client sitting on a few unpaid invoices? Hit Send Statement on the client page and Handl builds one email listing everything they still owe, grouped by currency, each line linking straight to pay. Preview it, add a note, send.
- See the email that actually went. Every client page has a sent emails history, and you can open the exact email your client received.
- The invoice PDF is attached to client invoice emails now.
- More room to edit. Change the lines, descriptions and issue and due dates on a draft. Edit a sent invoice as long as nothing's been paid on it, and add attachments after sending.
- Record a payment from any invoice menu, edit or remove it later, and it pushes across to Xero.
- Save my card. Clients can save their card on the pay page for future invoices.
- Moving to Handl mid-project? Set a billing start date per project, and hours you've already invoiced in your old system stay out of your new invoices while still counting towards cost and margin.
- "By category and person" grouping for time and materials invoices, so a client can see who did what kind of work.
→ See how it works: Handl in Slack · the AI agent · invoice automation → Free: invoice aging and chase tracker → Start a Handl trial
Statements, twice
Funny thing about this week. Handl got client statements on Saturday and Mortar got them on Sunday.
Nobody planned that. Two products, two very different customers... an agency owner and an interior designer. Both ended up needing the same thing: one place that says "here's everything this client owes you", and a clean way to send it.
That's the part of running a studio of niche products I like most. You build the specific version for each industry, but the good ideas travel.
Client work
Real Estate Jobs Australia — the agency section on the site now fills itself from live data. It shows the top nine agencies by number of open roles, updates as agencies post and fill jobs, and hides itself when there's nothing live to show. Nobody has to maintain the list by hand.
Also this week, employers can update the photo on a live job ad, agency pages show a proper location map, and the admin team got new support tools so they can help users without asking us.
If you need something like this built for your industry, this is what we do.
Marketing, behind the scenes
Mostly launch prep.
- mortar.design got its billing and payments page for the invoicing launch, live the same day.
- handl.works' What's new page got its full history. Every release from December 2025 to August 2026, 61 entries, with the Slack launch, the agent upgrade and client statements at the top.
- Writing for AI search. A plain "What is Handl?" section on the homepage, and a proper founder section on the About page. More people ask ChatGPT or Perplexity about tools before they Google them, so we want a clear, quotable answer sitting there.
One thing I learned
Shipping and launching are two different days.
The Slack agent's code was done in June. We could have announced it then. Instead it sat quietly while the rest of the agent caught up, and we launched the lot together in August with the product page, the changelog and the upgrade all saying the same thing.
For a long time I'd have announced the moment it merged. Build in public, right? But a launch is a promise to a customer that it's ready for them. Merging is just a promise to myself. Keeping those separate means the announcement can be the easy part.
See you next week.
— Daz
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