First of all, it was a hassle to produce invoices. But more importantly, I would find myself wondering at the end of the day: what have I been doing today and exactly how many hours did I spend on each project. I have the tendency to quickly switch between projects – for example when I get a phone call or an email about something, especially when it's urgent. So some days, I would be all over the place, just "putting out fires", so to speak – meanwhile forgetting to register the time I would spend on each task.

When I started freelancing, I tried to use a spreadsheet in Google docs for my timetracking. I could have downloaded an invoice template that would allow me create the invoices in the spreadsheet too, but the layout was always a mess and it was hard to add a decent design to it. Being a designer, I have some demands in that area, so I would use Microsoft Word to create the invoices. This meant copying/pasting the spreadsheet lines, manually changing the invoice number, etc. Looking back on it, can hardly believe I kept it up for two years!

So in short: the hassle of collecting the data for the invoices from various sources/applications and the difficulty of time tracking while switching tasks.

Creating invoices is just a press of a button now thanks to the seamless integration of time tracking and invoicing. The small timer app that sits in the top of my menubar, has reduced time tracking and switching to a mere two mouse clicks. Love it.

I started to notice that I had a much clearer image of the actual hours I spent on a project. When you work on an hourly rate, it's essential that you know how many "paid" hours you actually bill for each day/week/month. Billings made this possible, and provided me with many other insights, such as the hours I spent on unpaid tasks, or which customers demand the most unpaid time.

Well, I think my clients benefit from it but they don't know it. They benefit because the hours I charge them, are practically 100% spent on their projects. Before using Billings, I sometimes had to guess how many hours I had worked on a project that particular day.

Tremendously! I find myself working with a better structure now. I use another app for task management, but those tasks eventually become timed slips in a projects. Productivity-wise, Billings is also money well-spent. I am not a fan of accounting/bookkeeping and I only like the part where you send the invoices, haha. I think it used to take me about an hour and a half each week - now it's no more than 15 minutes to send invoices.

I sometimes feel like a lawyer now, haha. Whenever you call them and the call reaches 6 minutes or so, you get a (big) invoice for that here in Holland. My minimal time-unit is 15 minutes now, but simply because I track each and every action - and even when they're scattered over a week, I don't lose any time! And that shows in my invoices! The days where I ask myself at the end of the day: "what have been up to today and how many hours did I spent on what?" are gone now. 

Here's a (free!) quote that sums it up "With Billings, I get the most out of my time."

Sure do! The iPhone app has a really neat feature. It shows a weekly overview of the hours or revenues, displayed with a bar diagram. I love that! And I would love to see a similar thing in the software. I know there are companies that specialize in making reports, but since this has already been programmed, maybe there's a way to deploy it in the desktop version as well.