Veerle's blog

Like I promised in the previous article, we will explore some applications that I have been testing to finally find the one I have been looking for. One of the most important decision factors is the ‘User Interface’, that’s why I said it has to have the attention to detail like CSSEdit to name one. There is one application that earns that title and it’s called Billings. You feel at home and you don’t see artifacts of badly designed icons or counter productive ways of working. It’s truly a Mac application and it shows the efforts that the engineers have put into it.

What we have been using

We have been using iBiz for a while in combination with FileMaker Pro. We use iBiz mainly for its time-tracking features and the fact that it has multi-user support. It bothered me that we didn't have things organized in one and the same place or application. The invoice templating feature in iBiz is really not what it should be (as you'll see in the review). For me HTML is too limited to work with to create nice looking invoices. We had a FileMaker programmer create a customized database driven solution for us, but that was years ago and now it's not compatible anymore with the new version of FileMaker. There are a lot of things that I miss in this solution because of things you've learned along the way. We could maybe get it to where we want it, but I'm sure it would cost us a few thousands of Euros.

Looking for new ways to better organize day-to-day operations

I chose iBiz over Billings back then pure based on the multi-user support in iBiz which is not found in Billings (yet?). That was, I think, about 2 years ago. Back then, I tested both applications (and a few others) and found that there aren't many that have a high level of quality you come to expect. Billings had my preference over iBiz. I think it was more of a personal preference the way things work and look, because both applications are pretty close in how they work and feature set. I find the UI better in Billings then in iBiz, It's nicer and things seem to be in a more logical place. That's pure personal, but I strongly need to feel at home and the appearance has a lot of weight in that. There are some features in iBiz that I never knew where they were until now, and that's probably because I find them in a less logical place. Since about a month ago I've been testing Billings 2.5. I decided to give it a go and use it for real production. Of course I still have to deal with the fact that I don't have the multi-user support. I can only hope that the next version will have this feature because I believe the application will benefit from it.

What we will be using now

Because of our new identity, we had to re-create all the templates for invoicing and estimates. Since this involves a lot of work, we considered to switch to another solution. We decided to go for Billings in combination with Daylite and Basecamp. We have been using Basecamp for a couple of years already and are pretty happy with this service. It's a perfect way to centralize the communication on ongoing projects. As for Daylite, we're still in the process of exploring all its possibilities. I can tell you this already, this application has a lot of cool features and will save tons of time. The ties that Billings now have with Daylite since the 2.5 version are the first steps towards perfection. If Daylite would implement the Basecamp API it would even be better. I'll save this for a followup post because there is a lot to tell :)

Billings for estimates, time-tracking and invoicing

Now back to Billings. I decided to go for Billings on one condition and that was if the design templates I created in Illustrator could be integrated into Billings. It might sound as a rather stupid factor to decide upon, but for us this is one of the important reasons. As a designer it is important that all things look good even less obvious things like invoices. To me these details are the icing on the cake.

Setting things up

Since I'm already familiar with iBiz, Billings didn't seem to be a big challenge to set things up. When you launch Billings for the first time the setup assistant will ask you to fill out your "identity" information such as name and address etc. Next question is your country to link the appropriate taxes/VAT percentages and the currency. The application has dozens of tax setups, including standard tax rates for all 50 U.S. states, European VAT rates, and tax rates from many other countries. It's possible to customize tax rates and establish collectively applied sets of compounded taxes if necessary. In the preferences you can set your own categories, payment methods, your hourly rate, the estimates, invoice numbering and a few other options. First you add your contacts or clients. Just like iBiz, Billings work with Apple's Address Book, which I find perfect... except Apple should add the possibility to add extra fields for the user to define themselves such as VAT number for example or even website address. So weird that even this field isn't a default one. All you have to do is add your contacts to the Billings group in Address Book and you're all set.

Billings set up is like this: you do work for a client so that's called Projects and that project consists of tasks like creating a banner or a website design for example. These tasks are called 'Working Slips'. Now you can start working with Billings. You can easily create new projects and add estimates. First select a client, then click 'New Project'. You give the project a name, choose a state, for instance 'Estimate' or 'Active'. You can link files or URLs or add notes to it. I usually add the estimate PDF file, the URL to Basecamp and the invoice later on. For each project you can create estimate slips and once the estimate got approved and the project is a "go", you can turn them into working slips and track time for each slip. This basic process is the same as in iBiz albeit some different naming schemes. Only difference is, this time I actually work with the documents generated by the application and there is a more logical way of approaching things as well. Double click a slip, whether it's in the estimate or working stage and you immediately have all the info you need to have: The category, whether it's flat rated or timed, in quantity, expenses or mileage. Whether it's billable or not, if you need to apply taxes/VAT yes or no etc. You can add comments as well for each slip. You can also create blueprints. These are kind of template slips you can re-use in case you have to create the same slip over and over, pretty handy.

The UI

In version 2.5 they completely revamped the main window and that solved a lot of issues that I had in 2.0. The hierarchy of importance was sometimes lost and workflow was not clear at first sight. In this new version you double click a slip to see all info about that part of the project and you have all the information right there. The tabbed pages to show the process of a project is nice and I have no trouble reading the data from the screen. It feels well organized and very intuitive to work with for me. Of course it's not perfect, but I think it's close. What I miss is the ability to color label my projects. I often use the "All Projects" view and it would be very handy if you could color label them to better see what is estimate, what is active, which ones are closed, invoiced and paid, closed, invoiced and still unpaid etc.

There was one thing I had trouble understanding and that was how things work once you're in the Account Status phase. I just didn't understand what the 'Add Payment' and 'Retainer' button was for. Really, this must sound so stupid now, but I didn't. I didn't really understand the word retainer either. I was looking for a way to check a 'paid' status or something, so we would know when the invoice is paid. It was the fact that it said 'Add Payment' that got me confused a bit. I was thinking more in a way of checking a status 'paid' or 'unpaid'. Guess that must have been a language issue or maybe also the way I classify my invoice statuses. I never have invoices where only an amount is paid. It's either paid or unpaid. It's just that the 21% VAT on the invoice needs to be paid to the government and so if you invoice already and you don't have the payment yet, well, you still have to pay the VAT before the 20th of the first month of the next quarter whether you like it or not. Maybe this is different here then in the US? We also don't use the term 'balance due', it's 'total amount to pay'. This took me a bit of figuring out, but now that I understand it, it kinda makes sense.

Create the templates

Billings generates PDFs for your invoices and estimates. I believe this is a big plus because it means flexibility and you can keep things light because in Billings it's no problem to use Illustrator files or EPS files. You can even drag and drop them in the template. The templates are very customizable, but... it's best to have a look at the demo movies first so you know the basics. I was messing things up badly when I first tried to create mine and for some reason the 'undo' didn't work at times after I moved an item or stretched a box. I needed some serious assistance from Marketcircle to help me with this and the special requests that are specific to Belgium. For instance the category numbers the bookkeepers use to define where it belongs in the balance-sheet. Numbers like '705000' for services within the country etc. We use 6 variations of them. If it seems complicated to you, it's because our legal form is an 'n.v.' (a bit comparable with .inc) and there are more administrative obligations involved.

Here in Belgium we are obligated to have the client's VAT number on the invoice. If the client can't provide us a VAT number and he's based within the EU then we need to apply 21% VAT. If the client has a VAT number and is from Belgium, 21% VAT will also be applied but that client will be able to deduct the VAT. For clients outside the EU, VAT is never applied, and for any international invoice where no VAT is applied, I need to add a special sentence 'Free of VAT, Export' otherwise the invoice isn't conform the law. Things are pretty strict here on what needs to be on the invoice. The word 'invoice' needs to be on there for instance or it won't be considered as an 'invoice'. This is the same for invoices 'we receive', the incoming invoices. Simple 'receipts' from things we bought are 'not enough' for the government to threat them as invoices. You can keep them as 'extra proof' for certain costs, but sometimes in the end an invoice will be needed if you want to avoid a dispute with the tax department. Chances are that the government won't 'accept' the cost. These are the 4 different templates I use for our invoicing:

• Invoice in Dutch with 21% VAT applied : for Belgian clients
• Invoice in Dutch with no VAT applied : for clients in The Netherlands
• Invoice in English with 21% VAT applied : EU clients that have no VAT number
• Invoice in English with no VAT applied : EU clients with VAT number, or clients outside the EU

And then I have these 4 templates in the form of credit notes as well, in case of wrong invoices or invoices that have been refused, or part of an invoice that have been refused. Not sure if this is the case in other countries, but we need to send out a credit note when this situation happens. Unless it is a mistake on my part and it can be corrected because the recipient hasn't booked the invoice yet. So I actually have 8 different templates in total.

I don't think I would have been able to do this all myself, because I dind't understand how the dynamic text fields work. I was kind of expecting that after you drag a dynamic text field that you have the possibility to choose the dynamic field from a dropdown menu or something. I have only recently figured out how you define your dynamic field. When you double click the field you get this window where you have to define that field, but I had no clue how that worked. It didn't make any sense to me. After clicking around a bit I finally figured it out. I thought that the user had to enter the path to that field manually. Of course I had no clue what that path was. In my opinion this window needs some work so things look more intuitive and more logical because now it just doesn't.

Keeping track of estimates

One thing I miss though is a way to add 'potential clients'. How I understand it, you need to create a client and then once that's created you can add projects to the client. So what about all those answered requests from potential clients? We get so many of them and even the smallest ones needs to be in there so I know exactly what I've sent out if that client comes back to me. Sometimes I e-mail people back that I'm full-booked with work until a certain date. Then they e-mail back, so I need to be able to find all info I've sent to that potential client pretty quickly. If I add all of these potential clients as 'actual' clients in the list one by one, I end up with a very long list which will destroy a good overview of my actual clients. It would be very handy if you could categorize them into actual clients and potential clients or prospects. The most logical way of doing that would be by using folders and maybe categories also or an option to filter the list. The way I do it now is, I store all estimates of these potential clients under 1 client called 'Prospects'. I created an empty card in Address Book where I entered 'Prospects' in the company field to use in Billings. Each project within this client is an estimate. The name of the project holds the company name or the contact person. On this estimate I link a copy of the e-mail I sent and also the PDF of the estimate, in case I have generated one. I get a lot of small requests for instance for illustration work or a logo design. These requests aren't always answered with an extended PDF file.

Conclusion

I think the combination of Billings, Daylite and Basecamp will cover all the things we need. The fact that Billings and Daylite work so well together is a blessing :) In the next articles I'll talk about iBiz and Daylite.