Product Reviews

There's no shortage of software for tracking and charging for your time, but this beta of Marketcircle's Billings 2 looks like raising the bar. For the first time, high-end billing tools are available without an accompanying hefty price tag.

Billings 2 is a time tracker and billing manager that works intuitively from the start. Its setup assistant can automatically import client details from the Mac OS X Address Book. Handily, if you later change information in Address Book, the relevant details in Billings automatically update. If you delete an Address Book contact, Billings posts a warning offering to recreate contact details, rather than deleting the client.

You can also enter applicable tax codes during setup. Billings offers full UK VAT options, but also builds in editable support for local taxes in dozens of countries. What's especially pleasing is that even if you select VAT by default, you can add other countries' tax rates and select them from a drop-down menu when creating an invoice or estimate.

The three-pane Billings window is divided into a client list on the left, with active projects relating to selected clients in the adjacent pane. In turn, the tabbed pane below lists all information relating to a particular project, which can include estimates, tasks, invoices and payments. You can also specify retainers - prepaid amounts - to apply to particular projects.

Billings tracks tasks through working slips. To create a slip, you first enter details on how a task is to be charged - for example, either at a definable hourly rate or a flat fee. Slips can also be used to keep tabs of expenses or mileage, and there's even an option to use Billings as an invoicing tool for selling items rather than services. You can set markup or discount

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amounts for jobs and enter due dates for completion, which can later be published to Apple's iCal.

Usefully, you don't have to bill every task. You can track time spent, but make it non-billable, or track time in flat-fee tasks. It means that the program can work as a basic productivity analysis tool.

If you need to quote before you start work, you first generate an estimate slip in the same way as a working slip. This can be used to create an estimate to be sent to the client, and when you later start working on the task, you can convert the estimate slip to a working slip, which avoids having to enter details twice.

You can track time in a number of ways: from inside the main window, through a drop-down menu in the Finder's menu bar or most easily via system-wide 'hot keys', which can either start a new timed slip or trigger a floating Timers palette that manages all active slips at once. The menu bar item isn't intrusive, only appearing when Billings is running. When time is being tracked, the timer turns red and indicates elapsed time.

You generate an invoice from selected active working slips in the pane. Invoices can be saved as a file, automatically sent through your default email client, or printed out. Each working slip is allocated a separate line on the invoice.

Billings can also create reports, including lists of billed activities and projects, and even expenses or mileage reports. This feature is enhanced by the ability to easily design reports, estimates and invoices. You can either base these on existing templates or draw your own from scratch by dragging individual page elements, such as images, tables or text areas over a template preview. Intriguingly, you can also include dynamic elements on the page. This appears to employ a Smalltalk-based scripting language to draw information from your billing database. It's a pity Billings doesn't include full instructions on how to use what could be a very powerful feature.

Billings is far more powerful and versatile than any other time-tracking application we've seen at this price point. The only weakness worth noting is its inability to share slips over a network, which means multiple users can't easily aggregate their chargeable time. However, for one-man design outfits, particularly those who need estimating features, Billings is a bargain.