Billing is only half the work, you also have to get paid. A good invoicing program will make it easy to log your payments, view who owes you what, and run reports so you can get a quick overview of the state of your business.
The ‘Manage Payments’ screen in BillingTracker Pro is very straightforward. You can log two types of payments – payments for invoices that you’ve sent and payments on retainer (e.g. for work that you have not done yet). Once a retainer payment is made, BillingTracker Pro tracks the balance and allows you to create invoices against it.
The ‘Manage Payments’ screen itself shows totals for how much you’ve been paid for work done and billed, and how much you’ve been paid as retainer. Another column shows the payment status of each invoice, so you can see at a glance what is fully paid versus partially paid. You can sort and filter the display according to date, client, and invoice number and then export the resulting view.
The ‘New Payment’ screen gives you a very simple way to enter new payments for invoices that you’ve sent out. With one click you can enter a full payment for an invoice, or you can enter the amounts of partial payments. You can even mark a payment as a “write-off" if the client won’t be paying despite your best efforts. Two additional options are to mark an invoice as paid from an existing retainer balance or to mark it as cancelled, which is like write-off except done with your agreement. When you mark an invoice as cancelled or write-off, you are telling the billing system to stop tracking how many days late your client is because the system knows that this debt won’t get paid. If the client ends up paying, you can always edit the cancelled payment later. Needless to say, if your client combined several bills in one payment, you can include several invoices in one payment.
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