144 pull requests merged across 5 repos last week. A client site went live, and Handl got a new way to get paid. Here's the week.
Handl: get paid by bank transfer, straight into your own account
Card payments are great until you look at the fees. On a $12k invoice, a couple of percent is real money... and plenty of agency clients would rather just pay by bank transfer anyway.
So this week Handl got proper bank transfer collection.
You add your own bank details, per currency, and they show up on the pay page, the invoice email and the PDF. The client pays you directly. A direct transfer to your own account carries no Handl fee, and the money never sits anywhere in between. (Bank payments through Stripe, like PayTo, BECS and ACH, carry the standard bank-payment fee; see current pricing.) You choose which clients get bank transfer, client by client.
The fiddly part with bank transfers has always been knowing when they've landed. So there's now a Wise connector. Connect your Wise account, pick which profile Handl should watch, and incoming transfers get matched to the right invoice using the reference number. If you've got your books connected, Handl also holds off on payment reminders for anything that's already been paid there... so nobody gets chased for money they've already sent.
For Australian clients, PayTo and BECS direct debit are now on by default on pay pages, because they cost your clients nothing and cost you less than card. You can switch them off per client.
This landed the day after Handl in Slack went live for everyone (Sunday 2 Aug). So you can now ask the agent who owes you money without leaving Slack... and more of those clients can pay you without a card fee.
Also shipped in Handl this week:
- New reports. A team member report (hours, cost, billed and tasks per person), revenue split by project category and by team skill, and a rolling 12-week trend with the current period highlighted.
- Agency timezone. Set it once in settings and every report period lines up with your working week, not someone else's.
- Milestones linked to tasks. Link tasks from your PM tool to a milestone, and when they're done Handl drafts the billing item for you to check and send. The billing plan is now the single place a project's value lives, and milestones act as budgets.
- Revoke an invoice. Pull an invoice back with a reason, notify the client with an email you can customise, and the pay page and PDF show it's been revoked.
- Smaller things. Editable invoice titles, formatted invoice summaries (lists, bold, the basics), ticket-tagged hours billed as their own line, one billing item paid across several invoices, a health email that says why a project needs attention, and a responsive pass over the dashboard on mobile.
→ See how it works: invoice automation · client portal · Handl in Slack → Free: invoice aging and chase tracker → Start a Handl trial
Client work
Abilene Association of REALTORS® — launch week. The new site went live on 4 Aug.
Launches are never really about the day itself. It's the week after. So we spent it on the stuff members and search engines notice first:
- Every old abileneaor.com link now forwards to its equivalent on the new site, so bookmarks, emails and years of Google rankings carry over
- A proper contact form, wired up on both the site and the CMS
- Market stats pages can now be shared, with a back button to get you where you were
- Events and classes without a photo get a sensible default image, so the calendar always looks finished
- A cleaner sitemap, so Google indexes only the real pages
Association sites live or die on staff being able to run them without calling a developer. So the Abilene team runs links, events and pages themselves in the CMS.
If you need something like this built for your industry, this is what we do.
Marketing, behind the scenes
Most of the marketing work was on handl.works.
- A new invoice automation page. A proper commercial landing page for the thing most agencies come to Handl for, with real product screenshots. The old invoicing page now points to it.
- FAQs on the homepage and all seven solution pages, marked up so Google and the AI search tools can read them as answers. More and more people ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "what's a good invoicing tool for agencies" before they ever Google it... so we're writing for both.
- Homepage reshuffle. The "What is Handl" explainer moved to the bottom. People who land on the homepage mostly already know... they want to see it working.
- Changelog catch-up. Record a payment got its own entry on the What's new page. It shipped at the end of July and had no public mention at all.
One thing I learned
Deploy speed decides how small your changes are.
This week we split Handl's deploy pipeline into parallel jobs. Staging went from 33 minutes to under 9, production from 26 to about 9. Doesn't sound like a customer thing... but it is.
When a deploy takes half an hour, you batch things up so you're not waiting all day. Big batches are harder to check and slower to reach you. When it takes 9 minutes, you ship the small thing the moment it's ready. That's a big part of how 127 Handl changes went out in a week.
See you next week.
— Daz
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