Billing software is all about the invoice – creating it easily and accurately, and then helping you make sure that it is actually paid. BillingTracker Pro gives you an enormous amount of flexibility in creating the invoice, but also automates a lot of the functions so you can get those bills out quickly. Once you’ve gone through the Preferences screen and set things as you want them to be, creating a bill is quick and easy.
The ‘Manage Invoices’ screen presents a list of all the invoices that you’ve created and billed. You can sort this list and filter it by payment status, date, and of course client. At the bottom of the amount column is a total, so you can easily see how much you’ve billed. Use the filters to see, for example, the total of the paid invoices by a particular client.
You can export or print the list of invoices in the table by using the ‘Print List of Invoices’ button or the export function.
Of course, the most common thing you might do is to print the invoice after you’ve created it. BillingTracker Pro has 6 built-in invoice templates (with tons of tailoring you can set up in the Preferences screen). You can download even more templates from our Web site, or design your own. You can print the invoice, export it to PDF to email to your client, or export it to RTF, which is a format that can be opened by word processors (like Microsoft Word), if you want to edit it even more. Needless to say, you can put your own logo design on the invoice.
If you have lots of bills to send each month, then you might want to use the ‘Batch Billing’ function. Once you’ve set it up in ‘Preferences’, batch billing can create 10, 30, 50, or more bills in minutes, with just two clicks. Imagine finishing your invoicing in less time than in takes to drink a cup of coffee! Batch billing can even create all the invoices in PDF format, and automatically email them to your clients. Perhaps the best part about batch billing is its flexibility – you decide how automatic you want it to be (choosing the clients to bill, creation of the bill, export to PDF, sending via email) and how much you want to look at each step.
If you are creating one invoice at a time you will be using the ‘New Invoice’ screen. This screen follows the “set it once and forget it" philosophy of BillingTracker Pro – set things up in Preferences and most of the fields will be automatically filled in when you open the screen (you can of course override those defaults and change things as you want).
The ‘New Invoice’ screen is actually divided into three sections: the top white row, the big gray area, and then the bottom blue/white section. The top white area has general items about the invoice like its name, number, and date. The big gray area actually changes with each project that you add. If you add more than one project to the invoice, each one will show up in the gray area. You can flip through them by clicking on the little drop down field that is next to the ‘Delete’ button in the upper right corner.
The bottom blue/white section has totals for all the different projects that you’ve added. It also shows the terms (how many days until the invoice is due) and any discount that you want to apply. This section also lets you choose to pay yourself from a retainer balance that the client may have given you or add on a late fee if the client is late paying the invoice.
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