Last Christmas, we looked at a promising beta of Billings 2, Marketcircle's time billing and invoicing application for freelancers or self-employed Mac users. The last six months have seen big improvements to the program.
For many users, the most significant improvement lies in the program's integration with Daylite 3, Marketcircle's excellent customer relationship manager program. When you run Billings' setup assistant, not only can you import clients from your Mac's Address Book application, but you can also now grab them from a Daylite database, saving duplication if you use both programs. You can also send tasks and appointments from Daylite to Billings, and automatically update a Daylite-originated project when you send an invoice in Billings, although you have to have Daylite open for this.
Billings 2.5 also heralds changes to the program's appearance far beyond window dressing. The main window is still divided into panes, but the list of clients is now sensibly given the entire length of the left side of the window, while a split Projects pane occupies the rest. It makes the whole window more accessible and if we didn't think earlier versions of the program looked cramped, we do now.
The Projects pane, which holds a list of projects associated with each client, is neater. Projects are listed with start and end dates and pending amounts due, and can hold links to files and folders or web links. When highlighted, each project displays related billing details, including estimates, working slips and invoices, which are accessible through a chunky tabbed palette.
The Billings workflow is flexible. Most tasks begin by creating estimate slips for project tasks. Slips can either track timed or single-task activities, or you can use them to estimate expenses, mileage or quantities, complete with markup or discount. You either send the estimate to the client or keep it private, to be turned at the click of a button into a live, working slip, which will record time spent on a project.
Working slips created in this way are associated with their parent project, but you can also track time instantly from either the toolbar, a floating Timers palette or a keyboard hotkey, and assign the timed output to projects after the event. It's a handy way to record small pockets of time that you might otherwise overlook.
The Timers palette lists active slips underneath its main counter, so you can quickly select one - or more than one - and start the timer. When a timer is running, there are visual cues just about everywhere you look: the palette's counter turns red, as does the optional menu bar timer. The number of concurrently running timed slips are displayed on a badge on the program's Dock icon. And if you leave your Mac idle for a user-definable period while recording your time, Billings will warn you and offer to remove the idle time from the recorded time. Inadvertently leaving a timer running when you've walked away from your Mac is a frequent, if very profitable, oversight of many of those who bill by time, and the inclusion of this feature is sensible.
Another new feature in version 2.5 is the ability to edit multiple slips. For example, you can select more than one in the Timers palette and adjust their properties, including hourly rate, category or tax rate, in one go. When you've completed all the working slips, you can quickly collate them into an invoice by selecting them in the Projects pane and choosing the Send Invoice command to send them to the client.
Billings is more than a simple timer, though. You can run more than a dozen reports from lists of active clients, invoices and projects, and record received payments against either a single or multiple invoices. You can also share files with others by exporting them in native .bex format or text. The only drawbacks are that important elements such as invoice details don't seem to be exported alongside project details, and it's no replacement for built-in multi-user support.
Not only is Billings a great invoicing program, its new integration with Daylite will make it invaluable to users of that program. It isn't the simplest time-tracking application, but it may be the best.
Author: Tom Gorham
MacUser Online