Invoices.  Either you love them or you hate them.  If you’re like most people, you like sending them out (yay, payday!) but you hate receiving them (boo… time to pony up).  Creating invoices has never been particularly tricky; you could use a Word template, or you could use any of the programs listed on MacUpdate or VersionTracker.  Today, you can add Billable, a new application from the Pennsylvania-based software company Clickable Bliss, to the repertoire of Mac invoice software.

Upon first launch, Billable presents you with a handy Starting Points window.  This window contains a brief greeting from the developer and several buttons to get new users oriented and to provide some resources for accomplishing tasks and finding information.  Specifically, you can watch a (well-narrated and informative) QuickTime introduction to the program, set up your company’s profile, add/edit/delete clients for your company, view the primary screen, or link directly to the Clickable Bliss discussion forum.  This window stays open until you close it (or quit, of course).

The company profile automatically fills in the fields based on your personal Address Book card.  You can add a logo for your company that will appear at the top of your correspondence, and you can easily drag any image into this image well or navigate to it with the “Choose...” button.  Unfortunately, for owners of multiple businesses, you can only have one company profile.  You’d have to use different OS X profiles (or swap .plist files) to send bills for multiple companies.

Client editing is a comparably simple process.  You can simply add new clients, or you can import entries from your Address Book listing.  Importing an entry fills in any fields you’ve defined in Address Book reasonably accurately, but for some reason it does not automatically select the record you just created, and the window stays in an “inactive” state.  This requires two clicks to view the new record instead of the requisite zero.  The fields you get in the client editor are what you would expect, including name, contact person, address, phone, Internet addresses, and a default hourly rate.  You can also add an icon to identify your clients in the sidebar of the program’s main window.  Unfortunately, unlike your company logo, you can’t drag images to the image well here.

The main program window is simple and cleanly laid out.  The sidebar contains a listing with all your data (the Library), groups of invoices and services, and the invoices and services associated with your clients.  You can easily expand or collapse all of your client listings from the View menu, though it would be nice to have keyboard shortcuts for this.  The right 2/3rds of the screen contain a list of services and/or invoices belonging to the current sidebar selection and a pane that shows either your current service details or your current invoice.  To add a new service, simply click the toolbar button or press Cmd-N.  You will then be able to enter pertinent information, such as picking from your list of clients, the date, and whether to bill a flat fee or an hourly rate.  If you choose to bill hourly, you can enter the time spent and the rate, or you can start and stop a timer, and the program will automatically calculate your cost.  If you add a service with one of your clients selected in the sidebar, some of the fields, such as the client popup menu and the hourly rate, will be filled in for you.

Once you’re finished editing the details of a service, you can click “Create Invoice” (or “Select Invoice” if one has been created already), or click the “New Invoice” button in the toolbar with one or more services selected in the list.  This will generate a PDF file of, surprise surprise, an invoice, containing the details of your work.  From here, you can edit the invoice to change the date sent, the due date, any messages you may want to include (such as special instructions or verbal poking in the ribs), the amount paid and the date paid.  If you click the button labeled “Paid In Full,” the program automatically matches the total paid to the total due and fills in the paid date field.  These show up where you might expect on the invoice, but you also get a huge red “PAID” stamp at the top of the invoice.  When you update any of the invoice’s details, it automatically updates in the preview, where you can see exactly what your final invoice will look like.  However, if you update something else like your company’s profile or a client’s information, the invoice doesn’t update and you have to delete it and generate a new one with the current information.  The “PAID” stamp may also overlap important details, as it is very large and only a little transparent.

Once you’ve finished editing your invoice, you print it.  That’s right, to actually send it out, you have to go through the print dialog.  You can print it directly or use the universal PDF menu in the print dialog to save to a file, email, send to Yojimbo, and so on, but this feels like somewhat of a cop-out to actually implementing a proper Save or Export function.  That’s not to say these are missing, just to say they might as well be.  Export will only export to XML (and only your entire database, not individual invoices or services rendered; and then, you can’t even re-import it, should you lose your data), and Save appears to do… well, nothing.  It would be much nicer to be able to directly export a PDF from the application’s screen (as in the iPhoto-like “Print” button beneath the invoice preview) or from the file menu.  It would also be helpful to be able to open the PDF preview in its own window (with its own Preview.app-like controls) and resize, zoom, print and save from here as well.  As it is, you can only see the preview in a relatively small pane; the only way to make this pane bigger is to resize the application, which you might not want to do.  The final way to output your invoice is as a plain-text copy, which is useful for importing into programs like Word and formatting manually.

Speaking of formatting, while the invoice template that Billable generates its invoices from is simple and clean, you can create your own look if you so desire.  The process is a little cumbersome; you have to copy the HTML template from the application bundle to the program’s Application Support folder in your Library folder.  You can then edit to your heart’s content — well, almost… Billable dynamically generates the actual data with several specially-formatted strings, and modifying or removing these strings could have odd results.  As with any kind of design, discretion is the better part of valor; you can seriously distort your invoice’s look, and if you modify the background to anything besides solid white, you’ll end up with big white borders surrounding the contents of the invoice, which you may or may not be going for.  I also experienced a crash the first time I tried to export with a modified template, but the second attempt succeeded just fine.

At this time, Billable is limited to one (and only one) invoice template.  However, the author has indicated that future versions will incorporate some sort of switcher akin to what NetNewsWire uses.  In addition, I’d like to see a built-in template picker and HTML editor, as well as the ability to preview the template you’re currently editing.  An additional useful feature would be the ability to assign default themes to individual clients.

Billable is pretty smart about number formatting for dates and currency.  You can enter “Oct 25 06,” “10.25.06,” “oct-25/06” or almost any other format, and it will automatically convert to “Wednesday, October 25, 2006”.  You can enter whole numbers only, or as many decimals as you want, for currency values, and it will automatically convert it to $0.00 format.  Unfortunately, currently the program is limited to U.S. English notation, as “25-10-2006” doesn’t work and the program only supports dollars. See correction below.

The program’s interface also has a few rough spots.  For starters, there is no border between the PDF preview box and the application background, which makes the document “flow” into the background in an odd manner.  The services details/PDF preview pane also doesn’t automatically resize itself when you switch from one to the other, so you can end up with either lots of space underneath the services form, or a very squashed preview.  It would be nice to make this at least optional.  Currently, the only way to delete an invoice or service is to use the keyboard.  There’s no toolbar button, and the “Delete” menu item in the Edit menu is disabled.  It would be helpful to be able to click a button in the toolbar or to use a shortcut like Cmd-Delete so that you don’t have to use the mouse (click on the list item in question to move focus to it) as well as the keyboard (press the delete key).  And, finally, the program currently has very little contextual menu support.  I’d like to be able to context-click on items in the sidebar and list views and perform common actions on them, such as editing, deletion and expanding/collapsing.

Overall, Billable is a neat little program for creating invoices.  It is easy to use and does its job very well.  Currently, Clickable Bliss is running a special through Halloween for $5 off the normal price of $24.95.  If you create lots of invoices and haven’t discovered a better system, now’s the perfect time to switch over to Billable and start earning in style.

UPDATE: Mike responded a week ago with a few notes, and due to problems with my iMac’s power supply I did not receive them until now.  A couple small corrections and adjustments:

As far as creating invoices for multiple businesses or organizations, Mike suggests using rooSwitch.  While this may work (and I haven’t tried it), to me it seems kludgy to have to run another program for functionality that could be in the application natively.  Mike hasn’t indicated either way about adding this functionality, but I for one hope to see it sometime.

On the issue of dragging in a company’s icon, Mike writes:

The main reason for this is that the images need to be square, while as the
company logo can be freeform. Feedback noted though.

I wasn’t aware of this limitation, but I’m not sure how it applies to the different methods of getting an image into the program.  Useful to know, though.

Finally, a correction: Billable actually uses your system’s current localization settings for dates and currency, so it will use dollars, pounds, or whatever.  Mike notes, however, that it’s not perfect, as it automatically formats everything for decimals, while some currencies (like the yen) do not use decimals.  He is working on it.

Overall, Billable remains an excellent easy-to-use, stable and relatively glitch-free invoicing program.