I enjoy not messing my personal contacts with my business contacts and that GrandTotal leaves my address book alone. Plus we do not bill time but licenses, GrandTotal seemed very easy to setup and to adapt to our needs. All the editors are straightforward and very powerful. I would gladly take some keyboard shortcuts, but maybe I didn’t look hard enough!

So final: GrandTotal: no messing around, a very logical way of working, filing, writing, easily overridable fields during invoice entry, complete control of the invoice design, very reasonable price… Congratulation guys! And thank you!

Looking forward to what else is this promissing app brings.

Yeah, that sounds about right. The deal breaker for me, though, was the apparent lack of a basic project management function (along the lines of Billings). TimeLog doesn’t seem to handle anything other than time tracking very well (if at all).

Or am I missing something? I haven’t tested either GT or TimeLog very extensively, so it’s just my first impression.

~G

We’ve tested Billings, OTJ and GrandTotal and so far, we’ve decided to go with GrandTotal. Mostly because of two points that were very important for us: invoice template designer and multi currencies capability. Billings has much room for improvement in both, OTJ feature set is less extensive. Espesially when it comes to the invoice template designer, GrandTotal just outperforms both of them by far.

In the end, it comes down of what you workfow and needs are. As for Billings, it has the nicest interface of all.

As a translator/copy editor, I normally bill by the word, and Billings seems to have a nice, if basic, project management function that handles that nicely. With its project view, I can track which projects are in progress or completed, which is something that (on first glance) doesn’t seem to be possible (or at least not intuitive) with On The Job 3.

Oh well. Guess I’ll stick with Billings for now, even though it’s not perfectly suited to my needs either.

Cheers,
~G

There are some good choices here and what it’s really going to take for me is solid linkage to some sort of accounting package. GrandTotal and TimeLog have been highly rated and GrandTotal hasn’t even hit Rev 2.0 yet. . Billings is another app that is moving forward yet still is missing a few things (most of the attorney that I’ve read struggle with it handling different billing rates)

I’m glad there are so many good options on the Mac for invoicing. I’m confident that no matter what a persons needs are there will be a program to suit them.

My main concern in picking a package was the flexibility of the invoicing. That’s what the client sees, so that’s what matters most to me. Unbelievably, Billings can’t separate tasks by project on the invoice (sorting a big list of tasks by project is not enough). iBiz can’t “loop” through the data more than once, which means you can’t have a summary section with summary project information, followed by a detail section with detailed project information. On The Job has an absolutely beautiful UI, but the invoicing is still rudimentary, even in the new version. If you just need a great timekeeping application though, On The Job rocks.

I ended up buying Fanurio. The invoicing is so powerful: as far as I can tell, you can do pretty much anything you want. I was able to perfectly replicate my hand-made Excel invoice in Fanurio, and the developer will create the HTML template for you for free, so you don’t even have to know how to write HTML (which I don’t).

This is not a sales pitch. This is just a word to the wise: figure out what is important to you, and try all the packages to see what meets your needs.

I have to disagree I own Billings and switched to GrandTotal+Timelog combo, because of the fact the interface and workflow seems more logical for my usages. Also it is nice the developer always is updating its apps on a regular basis and add valuable features is reassuring that this isn’t a dead end solution.

As I also said in the article, from a price perspective, these two apps are more expensive than Billings or OTJ.

In regard to the iPhone app, fair point. I would contend that if you can re-submit invoices while on the go, then there will be more value. However, as stated, the app is free.

GrandTotal has a horrendous user interface so much so that it makes me want to stab my eyes out with closest pointy object available. From what you’ve described the iphone app is barely useful and provides in my opinion no functionality, but you can’t complain because it’s free right?

I would suggest the developers take some time to look into UI design for these 3 applications.

Billlings or OnTheJob are by far superior with regards to work flow and design. Not to mention that both of these products are cheaper than the GrandTotal & Timelog combo.