As a one man band, I’ve been doing invoicing, job tracking, etc. in a sort of cobbled together way in Excel and wordprocessed invoices, but I think the time has come to be a bit more methodical about it.
I mostly invoice clients on a monthly basis. Mostly I charge by the day, sometimes by hours spent on a particular task of a particular project for a particular client. It’s not a huge task really - the main advantage of using a proper application would be to keep track amounts and times, which in the end would mean I’d bill more hours.
I’ve noticed there are loads of small but perfectly formed billing, tracking and invoicing applications for OS X, and I’ve briefly tried quite a few: Billable, Billings, iBiz, Invoice, and some Filemaker template type things. They’re all okay but nothing’s a perfect fit. If I had the time and patience I could probably knock up something in Filemaker, but I don’t so I can’t.
My needs are simple, really - so much so that I’m wondering if my Excel/wordprocessing option is the simplest after all, despite my tendency to add things up wrong, and the reporting functions most of the applications have.
Have you tried Blinksale.com? It’s really, really simple. I only send a couple of invoices a month, so I use a spreadsheet, but if I sent a bunch, I’d use Blinksale.
I was skeptical about it at first (the screenshots were not very attractive, and I think it’s a Basic app), but it was far and away the best time tracking and invoice software I was able to find. Head and shoulders above all of the others that I tried (and I tried most of the official time tracking Mac software at the time; maybe a year ago).
The interface has improved a lot since when I started using it, too. There’s a 21 day free trial, so give it a look-see.
mamster - It looks good but it’s too web-based and I’m not keen on subscription services which cost the same amount a month that most of the apps cost to buy…
George - Tried out OfficeTime, and I’m sold on it. There’s a fortune waiting for the person who can make invoice templating simple though - but OfficeTime’s is the least worst, and using TextEdit (or Bean in my case) makes sense.
I agree. I think what we need is someone who really understands interface design to build a time tracking/invoicing app. A lot of the options out there are just far too cluttered to be useful, even when their feature list is strong.
A template isn’t perhaps ideal, but at least it gives me a lot of pretty easy-to-understand power over the final invoice, which was a big part of what attracted me to OfficeTime.
I’ve tried most everything for the Mac, and I’ve found Billings to be the best. billings2.com/. It’s beautiful and functional, though not perfect… but at least it allows you to charge in various formats, including the various types of “time” based (hour, day), as well as other units (as a translator, you often charge by word for example). Strangely, most other apps on the Mac can’t seem to do that, which is a bad oversight.
(I’m starting a different thread for freelance accounting software).
It’s true that there are many invoicing apps on the market and many of them miss some of the key points. If you are evaluating Blinksale for online invoicing, I strongly encourage you to also check out http://www.simplifythis.com, which is a pretty intuitive online app that lets you easily invoice your clients by email and get paid faster online.
I think Fanurio fanuriotimetracking.com is what you need. It is a desktop app that you can use to record projects, clients, expenses and invoices. It also has a nice mini view window for tracking time.