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The best multi-user time tracking and invoicing on Mac, iPhone, & Web.
Professional time billing for anyone.
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Overall, this is probably one of the best apps to help you manage your time and invoice clients. The list of features and design is brilliant, and it’s great value for money.
Billings was recently reviewed on Apple Bitesize, a new website focused on Apple product reviews.
It’s essential that you have a backup copy of your latest Daylite Backup Snapshot (.dlbackup). Losing your primary customer database could easily be enough to put you out of business. To have a completely reliable and automated backup system you should make sure your Daylite Server has each of the following four things setup:
Even though you might have Time Machine running already, Time Machine was not designed to backup databases (such as Postgres which is used by Daylite Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc.) while they are in use. You need to make sure Daylite Server Admin is configured to automatically create backup snapshots on your internal server drive.
Unless you have an abnormally large database, choose a backup schedule of “Everyday” and select a time of day during your off-hours. (In addition, manually backing up the database is good practice prior to performing a software update, importing data or doing any type of database maintenance.)
By default, Daylite Server is setup to place your snapshots into YourHardDrive/Users/Shared/Daylite Server Backups. The backup files that are created will include the database name, and a date/time stamp so that you can easily identify when the backup was created.
Again, it’s essential to have Daylite Server Admin create your Backup snapshots (.dlbackup files) which also verifies your data and creates a running history of your backups) so they can be backed up properly by Time Machine or another automated backup system. You’ll only be able to restore your database in case of a hardware failure from a .dlbackup file.
Now that you’ve got Daylite Server Admin creating regular backup snapshots, you need to have those backup files copied to another storage medium (external hard drive, Time Capsule or internet based storage) using an automated system. Time Machine is a great option for backing up your Mac because it’s so easy to initially configure. If you’re using nothing currently, definitely enable it on a simple USB backup drive as it’s better than nothing. However it lacks features needed to control how much space your Daylite backups will take up on the drive so be sure to make sure you’ve bought a big enough drive to hold all these daily backup files plus the entire contents of your server Mac.
Setup Time Machine article from Apple Support
SuperDuper! User Guide PDF
Use a cloud based data backup solution.
You must assume your drives could fail at literally any moment; hardware failure, incorrect software update procedures, or human error can and probably will happen to you at some point. Everyone should have a complete backup at any given moment of their critical business files and particularly your sales database. And “at any given moment” means it needs to be automated otherwise you just won’t remember to do it as often as you should.
If you use an online backup medium, keep a second backup on a USB thumb drive and store it off-site. If you use a physical on-site backup, put an archive copy on a secure off-site server or cloud storage provider on a regular, but less frequent schedule. Many people use the daylight savings time change (excuse the pun) as their reminder to change their online passwords. If you can’t automate this process completely, perhaps make these two times a year a chance to create an off-site backup if you don’t already have one. You may want to have a more frequent archive period, depending on your business needs.
Take the time now to check how much space you have on your Server’s internal and backup drives.
Running low on space
You should have enough space on your drive to hold daily backups for the last 3-6 months or as at least as long as your time between archives. If you don’t have enough space, you’ll have to make your archive period shorter and create an off-site archive more frequently. You could also trim old backup files to save space, or buy a larger backup HD.
1) You can either manually remove backups older than your archived off-site .dlbackup when you are periodically creating those archives if doing so manually. In List view, sort by Date Modified and select all files older than your archive period.
2) Or you can automate removing old backups using a great utility called Hazel, which lets you filter files and perform actions on any folder in the filesystem. You can use a rule like this to remove backup files older than [X time period], but please adjust them based on your archive period you chose up in Step 3:
(Big Legal Disclaimer™: Hazel is not our product and so if it chews up any data because of a one in a million bug, please don’t blame us. We’ve seen it working great for many of our customers and the guys at Noodlesoft seem cool too, so we wanted to share it with you. Please make sure you have double redundant backups before implementing any sort of automated scripts that remove data from your system.)
Each time a Daylite database backup is created, the entire database is backed up, including all file attachments to emails recorded with Daylite Mail Integration (DMI). If you think that large email attachments might be contributing to your database size, you can strip or archive attachments by running the Attachment Archiver inside Daylite Server. This will speed up both backup time, and the time needed to initially add new users or devices to your database.
Whether you are a company of one or one hundred and one, you must set a policy for managing and maintaining your database and server backups. We would highly recommend you make sure you are doing all four things mentioned. And to regularly double-check your system to ensure that backups are being created and managed correctly by the system. Time spent today will save you a ton of time AND headaches *when* your system decides to fail on you.
If anything here is unclear, let us know and we’ll try to clarify in the comments.
When I came across the “Four Qualities of Outstanding Salespeople” section in the book Driven (by Robert Herjavec) I immediately thought of sharing it on our blog.
Whether you’re a salesperson by definition, the founder of a new business, or simply a freelancer, these four qualities are important to have. They’re also good to be aware of when you’re trying to convince your boss (or wife) of something 
Four Qualities of Outstanding Salespeople
- They believe in what they do. Selling is difficult and demanding, especially when the economy is bad. Handling the inevitable rejection and failures is impossible without total commitment to your job as a salesperson.
- They enjoy and engage people. Effective salespeople make buyers feel good about their decision, and they do this by engaging other people.
- They listen more than they talk. By listening closely, good salespeople learn about needs and concerns, and know when and how to employ sales techniques.
- They eliminate reasons not to make the sale. Positive attitudes are wonderful, but they alone are not enough to eliminate buyer objections. Countering buyer objections effectively is the single most important talent of a good salesperson.
I recommend checking out the entire book – lots of useful stuff in there. You can get it from Amazon or in iBooks.
Robert Herjavec is a Canadian businessman and investor, most famously known for his role as an investor on CBC’s Dragons’ Den and ABC’s Shark Tank.
Robert came to Canada when he was only three, settling in with his family that had almost no money.
In 1990 he founded BRAK Systems, which soon became Canada’s top provider of Internet security software. BRAK Systems was sold to AT&T in 2000 for $100 million, and Herjavec took a position there as VP of Internet Security. He subsequently became VP of Sales at RAMP Networks, which was later sold to Nokia for $225 million. In 2003, Herjavec founded The Herjavec Group, a security software company, of which he is presently the CEO.
We’ve released Daylite and Daylite Server 3.15.1 with support for OS X 10.7.3.
We’ve fixed:
You can get the latest versions of Daylite and Daylite Server from our Daylite downloads page.
*Note: Be sure to follow these steps when upgrading Daylite and Daylite Server.
Did you spend the last year invoicing your clients with a beautifully designed InDesign invoice template or Word even? Are you dreading having to prepare all of your financial information for your accountant, or doing your own taxes? Maybe you’re just starting out and not invoicing all that frequently. Or perhaps your most pressing concern was having awesome looking invoices, sure to impress your new clients and re-enforce how professional you are.
STOP THE MADNESS!
Spending your time copying and pasting into Excel or using a calculator to total up your earnings for the year is definitely not how you want to be kicking off the new year. Or worse, how you want to be spending late nights in April, or just prior to your tax deadline, trying desperately to figure out how much you invoiced and expensed over the past year.
InDesign is an awesome product for making print layouts. It’s time to make a resolution to invoicing differently in 2012. Consider any option that meets the following three criteria:
In Billings, in the source list select Reports and then choose “Invoice Details by Client”. Then choose the date range you’re looking for and click run. You’ll get a report that shows how much you’ve made from each client along with details from each invoice.
If you collect sales tax, you need to be able to easily total up how much you’ve collected either on an annual or quarterly basis. Even if you’ve tracked the grand totals in a spreadsheet, having to go through each invoice manually to pull out this data, or calculate it based on your totals can be extremely annoying. Again in the Reports section of Billings, choose “Taxes Collected”, set the timeframe to pull data from, and click run. Both you and the taxman are happy.
Even if you don’t bill back expenses to your clients, it makes tax time quite a bit easier when you’ve done the inputting all year long instead of spending days on end searching through shoeboxes of faded and wrinkled receipts. 
In Billings, categories are defined in Preferences which is found in the Billings menu. Select the labels pane and then choose the categories tab. I add in each expense category I use with the prefix “Expense:” so they’re all grouped together when I’m selecting it in the slip entry window. To see how much you’ve spent, look under Reports > TimeSlip > Expenses By Category or Expense Tax Report. Take these to your accountant, or tax software if you’re doing your own and enjoy writing off all your costs of doing business.
Consider what your normal billing rate is and than estimate how much time you spent organizing all of this after the fact. Any solution you choose will pay itself back in no time.
No matter which way you go, having a system in place from the beginning of the year will make the task seem so much more manageable. Having a pile of invoices and receipts three feet tall is just the sort of job that gets procrastinated over and over again until the very last minute. Setting yourself up with a simple system that you make time for once a week, or once a month, becomes infinitely more manageable. In our next article, we’ll look at some easy ways of customizing the invoices Billings generates so your clients will be as impressed with your invoice as they are with your work.
Seven Macworlds. Sounds like a lot right? I thought so too until I talked to some real veterans of the show. A few people that I encountered had been attending Macworld for 20+ years. So, even though I’m not holding or breaking any records with my measly seven attendances, I’m still proud to have rep’d Marketcircle for this many years.
We had plenty of visitors to our tiny little booth, affectionally referred to as ‘lemonade stands’ or ‘phone booths’. This is the only show that we do that is attended by only Mac and iOS users. It’s so great to interact with customers face to face after sometimes years of relationships based solely on email & phone exchanges. I hope that every Marketcircle employee can experience this one day to see what great people are out there using our software. I somehow feel guilty to be the one that always gets to go, but knowing how much I love California, (my hometown is beautiful SF) I don’t think the higher ups dare to bench me.
Speaking of hometowns, I experienced one of the best ‘firsts’ of my life on Sunday January 22nd at 3:00pm Pacific.
Aly and I scored tickets (thanks to Abbi of FastMac) to the 49ers–Giants game. I was finally able to attend a Niners game in the legendary Candlestick Park where the best quarterback in the history of the game (my opinion and I’m sticking to it) Joe Montana himself played the game. To say the experience was memorable would be the understatement of the year.
And much like Candlestick, Macworld is home to the giants of the Mac industry. You cannot substitute meeting and interacting with some of the best developers from all over the world. Having us all in one OS X zone allowed us to refer traffic to each other and feed of each other’s energy. It was great way to spend time with our fellow Mac and iOS developers.
I’m very much looking forward to continuing the tradition of traveling to San Francisco each year to participate in this event.
If you’re an independent freelancer, or own a small business or startup, or even if you think your role at a more established company has nothing to do with “sales”, everyone sells. From the custodian to the CEO, everyone is responsible for representing their company and this either helps or hurts a business’s bottom line. I think many of us don’t think of ourselves in this way, or even actively dislike the word “sales”. But the reality is that there are simple activities everyone does to gain new clients, and how efficiently you do these things will directly impact your revenue. Having a habitual system that you follow, even when the “real work” of business monopolizes your time, will help your cash-flow improve and avoid missing out on the big opportunities you are seeking.
If you are looking for magic phrases to say at closing, or ways to convince people their objections aren’t valid (“The sale starts when you hear the first ‘no.’” – Some-guy-from-the-80′s), this probably isn’t going to be for you. Nothing is worse for sales than putting on some fake persona and saying things you wouldn’t normally. Be real. Improving your sales has more to do with forming good habits than anything you could possibly say.
We at Marketcircle very strongly believe that a key aspect to growing a business is focusing on getting new business. It seems like an obvious statement, but I’m sure we can all think of someone we’ve met in our lives whose default mode is to sit back and wait for customers to come through the doors. While this may work for some companies who have worked for years to build a brand and make some of the greatest consumer products ever (see Apple, Inc.). But for the rest of us, sales and revenue may take a bit more effort and hustle.
I’d like to start by talking about sales cycles and how understanding your own sales cycle can help improve your cash flow.
Without going all MBA on this, cash flow is the movement of money into or out of a business (as defined by the borg collective). Usually, one prefers to have more coming in than going out. I believe this, in financial circles, is called positive cash flow. So increasing sales obviously results in more money coming in and we should be good to go, right? Well, only if you have enough **time** to sell to the next customer before the repo man comes to take away your Aeron chair. Think of your sales cycle as the time it takes from first identifying a prospect to finally signing a contract and receiving payment from your new customer.
I have a friend who is starting out his career as an architect and is trying to build up his own independent practice. He told me about this guy he met who bought a huge old mansion downtown and was looking to develop it into apartment units. Four months later, we ran into each other again and I naturally asked about it. He said that they had only just recently finalized contracts and gotten the project underway. I remember him clearly saying, “I had no idea how long it was going to take to get everything sorted out before we could start work”.
Just like most people who decide to start a business, we tend to focus our efforts on our craft first and doing good work and hope that the business stuff doesn’t take too long. Problem is if you have no idea how long it takes to close another deal, you can easily get caught off guard and find yourself staring at next month with no projects booked and thus no money coming in. I asked my friend to recall how long it took from meeting that guy to getting a cheque from him. I suggested that if it took four months last time, and he has scheduled this project to take nine months, then as of five months from now, he better have met his next customer. And then, he’ll need to juggle his time between completing his current project and developing that next sale. He said, “Oh,” his lip slightly quivering and with what looked like a small tear developing in his left eye.
So, do you know how long your sales cycle is? If not, find the last three (or more) contracts you signed and then go through your email and figure out when your first met those clients. Average those times out and now you’ve got a very rough idea how long your cycle is. In the next article, we’ll discuss some ways of shortening your cycle so ramen cup’o'soup can become fancy japanese udon noodles instead.
Using cloud storage to share files amongst team members has become fairly common in recent years. Dropbox has become a popular option for cloud storage by making their product so simple that you eventually stop thinking about whether your files have sync’d and just use it like any other folder on your computer. If you haven’t used Dropbox yet, go sign up for a free trial account now. It’s okay, we’ll wait…
An easy way to integrate a Daylite Project and Dropbox together is by using file references that point to a project files folder stored on your Dropbox.
Optionally, this folder can be shared with other team members too*. With file references, you can point to either a local file, or a website URL. We’ll use a URL in this case, so that no matter which team member clicks on the file reference, it will take them to the correct folder. This same technique will work with other cloud storage providers such as box, that can give you a web URL. In addition, there is a custom box HUD that goes a little bit further as shown by Marni at macangel.com.
We’ve made a 60 second video that shows how this works:
* Check out the Dropbox help site for more info on how to share a project.
If you use the Projects feature in Daylite and are interested in learning more about how to use Dropbox within your current workflow or have any questions on this topic, we are hosting a Webinar on February 7th at 4 PM EST that will be focussed on how to become more efficient in tracking projects using Daylite. Register here to save your spot.
Due to demand, we’ve added a second session and have made it earlier in the day to accommodate our European friends. Please Register Here to save your spot.
We’re honoured to learn that Daylite Touch has won the Best Business App of 2011 by the Best App Ever Mobile Application Awards!
This is Daylite Touch’s second major award, the first being Macworld’s 2009 Best of Show winner.
Billings Touch also received an honourable mention under the Business category, something we’re also quite proud of 
Some great backup advice from Haystack Software, starting with an important point:
Assume your hard drive will fail very soon.
Expect imminent disk failure no matter how old or new your hard drive is.
Even a brand new, fancy SSD can fail at any time. “A few days later he wrote back saying the SSD was the culprit.” writes a customer of Haystack Software’s Arq, an online Backup tool for Mac.
Backing up your computer is always an important thing for any user to do – home or business. Just like you don’t want to lose your family photo library, losing critical documents, or key operational data, like a customer database for example would be just as tragic for a business. If you’re using your computer for any reason really, backing up simply isn’t an option – it’s a MUST.
You might have your contacts and calendars, some of your files in Dropbox or iCloud maybe, but what about everything else? Even losing things like your applications and passwords could mean quite a bit of downtime and lost money if you have to start over. Everyone should consider all aspects of their digital lives and make sure their backup strategy is automated, simple and redundant.
The guys at Haystack have put together a great article outlining the 7 facets of a good Mac backup strategy. It’s a great reminder to ensure your backup plan is in order, or wakeup call to make sure you create one.
