Billings 3

For the MacOS only.

As a small business owner, tracking the projects that you are working on, the hours worked, your billing rate, generating invoices, etc. can be a hassle. I bought Billings 3 a couple of weeks ago to solve these issues and am glad I did. While you can visit Billings 3 web site to learn, here are a few pros and cons from my experience:

Things I Like

1. Getting started is really easy. Simply import client information from your Address Book, create a new project associated with the client, create a working slip, set your hourly rate, and start the timer to clock your hours.
2. After the application is started a little clock timer shows up in the MacOS menu bar giving you a handy way to start/stop time. You can also set when the timer should time out in case you forget to turn it off manually.
3. Working slips are how you track time and itemize work for a project as a whole. I like to label my working slips by versions, milestones, iterations, etc. For example, I might have a project called GeoMiner that requires two months worth of work with two-week milestones. Each working slip slip can be labeled Milestone 1, Milestone 2, etc.
4. Being able to generate professional looking invoices from working slips saves me a ton of time. It only takes a couple button clicks to turn a working slip into an invoice which can then be e-mailed as a PDF or printed out.
5. There are multiple theme templates you can choose from to style your reports, invoices, etc. There is also support for building your own theme or customizing an existing one.
6. Theme templates can also be applied to labels and envelopes. I find the envelope printing feature very handy not only for clients but for other printing purposes where you need a professional look and feel.
7. Even though a project must be tied to a client, there is support for personal projects. For me, this is extremely handy as I use personal projects to track time spent on open source projects, the work I do for my HOA, experimental R&D, etc. Even if you are not running a business, I see this as a great tool to add perspective on how you manage and spend your time.

Things I Don’t Like

1. Client information is pulled from your address book when setting up new work. That is fine. What I don’t like is that a new category gets automatically created in your address book called Billings. Bah.
2. I wish you could track stock being earned in a company. Let’s say that for each hour you work, 5 shares of stock is accumulated. It would be nice to automatically track and see a summary of your stock total by working slip and project as a whole. The workaround is to use the customized fields feature of a project, label it “Stock Shares”, and then manually do the calculations after each invoice billed.
3. When going into triple digits for hours worked, the timer really only has space for showing double digits so some of the numbering gets cut off unless you dig into the log a bit more. Not a big deal but something that could definitely be fixed in the future.

So give Billings 3 a look. I definitely recommend buying a copy (which is at a discount currently) if you are in need of tracking projects, time, and keeping yourself organized.

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