Billings for Mac

5.0 stars

"The ultimate small business helper for billings"

January 13, 2010  |   By val2many

Version: Billings 3.5.2

Pros

Pretty, easy to use, price is ok, reasonable feature set

Cons

no cons for this app

Summary

If you run a small business and want to take care of your billings. This is the way to go. I have been using it for a small agency and do not miss anything.

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3.0 stars

"Proof that beauty is only skin deep"

November 10, 2008  |   By pcal

Version: Billings 2.5.6

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Billings looks very nice. The UI is reasonable intuitive. It's really the only app of it's type that looks and feels like a real mac app.

That's about all the good I can say about it. Some of the not so good I would say about it:
- It crashes
- On a good day, it uses 5% CPU in the background. Why?
- On most days, it eventually uses upwards of 25% CPU in the background.
- It's true that it has a highly customizable templating engine, but good luck figuring out how to use it.
- It has a fairly bizarre and useless way of tracking time in a working slip: it doesn't track "4pm to 5:30pm". Rather, it just tracks that you spent 90 minutes. It has no notion of start or end time.
- The reporting/invoicing engine has no support for totaling time spent on an invoice (despite users asking for this for literally years)

I paid $60 for this software barely six months ago. I think there was one update in that time. And apparently I've seen the last update I'm going to see without paying another $35 for 3.x. Unacceptable.

I'll limp along with it for now until I can find something better.

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3.0 stars

"Works great for some things but hampered by poor..."

July 27, 2008  |   By mauorozco

Version: Billings 2.5.6

Summary

...customer support
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
I've been using Billings for a couple of months and I'm impressed by how nice it looks and easy it is to navigate the app. The only thing I wish I had done before purchasing is check the user forums at MarketCircle. It seems the company has a poor track record of getting information to customers regarding bug fixes (a lot of solutions they offer have to do more with the user doing extra steps in the workflow or using scripts from outside sources to work things out).

There are obvious requests from users that have taken a very long time to get fixed or just haven't been done. The invoice customizing feature is very difficult to figure out, and with a limited user manual or tutorials, you definitely have to invest more time than necessary to understand things.

At $60 I think better support should be a given.

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1.0 stars

"Still looking for a decent alternative"

June 5, 2008  |   By Frank Pryor

Version: Billings 2.5.6

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Every time I do my billing with this program I search for something to replace it with. Note to Market Circle: this is NOT the user experience you're looking for.

When sending an estimate or an invoice you must remember to MANUALLY select all of the item slips before creating the document. If you do not hit the Preview button before sending you will not know if you've missed one of the slips. If you find you've missed one of the slips you have to cancel out of the dialog, LOSING ANY COMMENTS YOU'VE MADE at that stage.

Billings allows you to turn those estimates into invoices. Again, you must remember to select all of the "slips" before creating the invoice or your billing will be wrong. When you get to the Create Invoice dialog you will notice that the software does not carry over the job description in the comments field from the ESTIMATE but from the LAST INVOICE, which likely has nothing to do with the invoice you are currently working on.

The "solution" is to search for the PDF of the original estimate, copy the comments from that document and paste them into the invoice.

In short, Billings provides multiple opportunities to produce INACCURATE or INAPPROPRIATE estimates and invoices and makes more work for you than it should.

In addition, you are able to assign a State to a project but this is of limited utility. The available states are Estimate Active Completed or Cancelled. One of the critical questions one has about workflow is whether or not a job has been BILLED, but there is no label that reflects this state.

The best thing I can say about this software is that it keeps me away from Quickbooks for estimating and invoicing, but I am desperate for someone to produce a functional alternative, or alternatively for Billings to make these small but critical changes.

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1.0 stars

"Template driven feature set very limited."

February 27, 2008  |   By mjkphoto

Version: Billings 2.5.5

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
If your workflow includes multiple projects per client and you wish to include more than one project on an invoice, Billings is not for you.

Billings tracks your work by project and work slips within a project. But what if you have more than one project for a client. You must print a separate invoice for each project/client. Dumb.

Want to track start and end dates/times for your work. You can. It is cumbersome and there's no way to include this information on the limited reports offered.

You can't customize reports.

Billings is a limited, template driven time tracking and invoicing software with poor documentation, limited, cumbersome customization options, and poor implementation.

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3.0 stars

"Finally!"

December 18, 2007  |   By generic3

Version: Billings 2.5.5

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Let me be clear that Billings does not do everything I want it to do and many of its functions seem counterintuitive to my tasks. But after evaluating dozens of packages and finding them either too expensive, too bloated, too broken or too difficult, Billings is a relief.

My business is a marketing consultancy. I needed estimating, invoicing and job/time/expense/mileage tracking. I also wanted Payroll management, but that was a nice "also-have." (Billings does not have it.)

Billing takes a while to decipher, but once I figured out what I wanted out of the program (about two days of playing) I suddenly had a powerful tool that generates exactly the types of reports I need, reminds me of when to invoice, and either tracks or accepts my time entries perfectly.

And best of all it has a custom invoice editor built, something I really wanted, but was afraid to ask for in shareware.

There are bugs, but nothing that's a deal breaker. For instance, if you change a date, the list of projects doesn't update to the right order until you click away. And the form editor is just passable. I'm glad it's there and love it, but it is difficult to work with and doesn't respond the way I want. For instance, I put a watermark of my logo in the background, but then it just planted itself on top of everything in the editor. The actual form looked great, but it's nearly impossible to edit the form now that the watermark image is there.

Anyway, I wanted to help others in a similar business understand that if you are a small consultancy that runs on estimates, time billing and project timing, this is your best bet.

Bob

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5.0 stars

"Billings has become best of class"

December 15, 2007  |   By hueco

Version: Billings 2.5.5

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
I have admittedly been slightly unhappy with Marketcircle in the past, when they dropped the ball on Billings development for many months (see early reviews). They did, however, eventually come up with the features promised at 1.0, and every update since has been free for the earliest adopters. Given a choice, I'd rather pay for updates and have them arrive in a timely fashion, but I think Marketcircle has acted in a fair and generous manner with regards to how things developed -- or not as the case was for a long time.

The previous review does highlight a shortcoming -- i.e. documentation -- but it can be overcome. There is a PDF floating around that outlines the ideas of the layout-engine. Once mastered, it is the most powerful tool available for custom "paperwork." I found reading the PDF a great help in understanding how it fundamentally works, and the rest is sorted out with a little trial and error. I now use a selection of templates that can beat the advertised 5-min mark for fast and easy creation of estimates and invoices. But mostly I spend a little longer, just to admire my designs ;-).

I hope Marketcircle will stick with Billings now and get into a profitable routine of regular, paid updates. Billings is no longer an app with just promise and potential; it delivers better than any app of its class.

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3.0 stars

"Productive work in the end not possible"

December 2, 2007  |   By xplicit

Version: Billings 2.5.5

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Billings is good at tracking time, but there are deficits in some most important things:

1. Creating fully-customizable invoices isn't that easy because there is absolutely NO documentation on creating customized invoice templates, just a poor video that explaines things you can find out by yourself in about 10 minutes.

2. There seems to be no support for technical problems. I've written several emails, used their so called support contact form, etc., never got any answer.

What good is an application that can gather all necessary data for an invoice but doesn't let you create customized invoices hence you cannot send invoices to your clients?

And 59 bucks is a lot of money for just a time-tracking application.

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4.0 stars

"No localizations and international currencies"

July 30, 2007  |   By post92

Version: Billings 2.5

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
A nicely designed program, but useless for many people in the world without localizations or, at least, the possibility to change the currency. Non-US users, try iBiz instead. The design isn't as sleek, but it works and offers at least some other languages.

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