Bernskiold Media

When you are a web designer or graphics artist in need of tracking your time, there are several solutions available. I’ve been using this application for the Mac called Billings from Marketcircle for some time and I’ve taken a liking to it.

Billings 3 is an application that let’s you track the time you’ve been working on a project and then later bill the client for it. You’ve got a lot of functionality in there. You start by importing clients from your address book, which will make them show up in the main billings window. You can then add projects to the clients and in each project you can add both estimate slips (to make up an estimate) and then go on to working slips. It’s a really powerful system that’s still easy and fast to use.

When you have an active slip open, you’re going to see a time indicator in the finderbar.  This lets you quickly pause and resume the work on the active slip and it also helps you to see how much time you’ve spent on the project.

When you’ve completed work on a project you can select one or multiple working slips and create an invoice out of those. The Billings engine has many great invoice (and estimate) templates built in, but also a template editor if you wish to create your own template. When you’ve created the invoice, it’s moved into the Accounts section, where you can see all invoices and receipts the clients have, in chronological order. You can also quickly see the current balance.

There are of course a lot of different reports available as well in the reports module allowing you to print out valuable reports in an easy way. You can also print labels and envelopes if you wish.

I’ve been using Billings for quite a while now and I really think it is a good application that makes it simple and easy to track time and send out invoices to clients. While it’s mostly great, there is a thing that I’d really truly like to see in the application. That thing is multiple currency support. The way it is now, it’s using your computers default currency, only. If you wish to print out invoices in another currency, you need to modify the templates and hardcode in the other currency symbol, which will in the end make a mess in the reports that will never show it right. I wish this would be added really soon!

Billings 3 is created by Marketcircle and available at their site for $59.