Billings 3 from Marketcircle, Inc. is designed to track projects for clients, account for time spent, invoice clients and track payments. Itis perfect for small businesses, freelance writers and Web developers, for example, and it exploits good Cocoa development principles. One of the key advantages is its ability to present a professional look to the client by virtue of the design of invoices.
According to Marketcircleis CEO Alykhan Jetha, Billings was a natural follow-on to their flagship project, an opportunity and workgroup management program, Daylite, now in version 3. While Daylite is designed as a shared database program to track tasks, schedules, clients, and business opportunities, it can also be used by a single person. What it lacks, however, is the means to prepare professionally designed invoices that can create a very favorable image to the customer. Billings 3 performs that task.
To that end, the program implicitly encourages the user to create a uniform business identity. For example, some thought should be put into matching the graphics of the business logo, printed in each invoice, with the business cards and stationery.
Just as important, when it comes to a database driven systems, is how the relational database is presented to the user and how that user interface invites a natural, intuitive workflow. (The underlying database is single-user SQLite.) For example, when you want to start a task, you want to start it now. When itis time to create an invoice and mail it, that should be instant, intuitive and heavy on visual feedback to make sure the customer is billed correctly. Billings 3 achieves those goals.
At the core, Billings 3 focuses on the idea of clients and projects for clients, in a very visual way.
 Client and Project Management |
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