Before I discovered Billings, my process had complicated itself to the point where I was using an ancient timer program to count minutes, a calculator to add up my hours, and Word to type out my invoices & create PDFs. I kept forgetting to turn on the timer, because it just ran in the background; sometimes I'd forget to turn it off, too! To mark an invoice as paid, I'd move it from an "Unpaid" folder into a "Paid" one, another task that wasn't always easy to remember to do.

The extra 30 minutes it took from project completion to actually sending off an invoice was frustratingly anticlimactic. There was also no way to tell at a glance how many hours I'd already billed, how close I was getting to my initial estimate, or which clients had paid on time.

Hands down, it was the ability to customize my invoice design completely. My clients are split between Canada and Norway, and all other invoicing software I tried fell short when it came to creating three separate templates: an English invoice for Canada, an English invoice for Norway, and a Norwegian invoice for Norway, all with different numbering and labels. I'd also grown accustomed to having total control over the colours, fonts, placement etc. while using Word to create my invoices, and the other programs I tried weren't satisfying my design-minded side at all.

Learning how to code the templates was a bit of a time investment, but it was well worth the effort. Having the bright red timer display in my menu bar is a stroke of genius and keeps me on track, and marking invoices as paid is totally painless (also, the PAID stamp and receipt corkboard always make me smile, geek that I am!).

I never forget to start a timer, so I don't end up accidentally working off the clock. Checking whether a client has paid or not just takes one click, instead of laboriously sifting through my bank statements. Most importantly, sending off an invoice takes about 10 seconds. All of the above means I have much more time to spend working billable hours instead of pulling my hair out over getting it all together.