1. 10-15 clients. Work with nearly all of them at one time. Payments vary from 1-10 days to 2-3 months. We don't sent clients reminders, but contact them individually when necessary. Sometimes we are asked to resend the initial invoices.

2. We have hundreds of client projects in Daylite. 50 or more can be active at any one time. Hundreds are inactive. We almost always have more than one project going on for a particular client at a time.

3. We generally bill monthly. We don't collect deposits or work against a retainer. The names of the tasks we bill for can be repetitive, but we need to tailor them to our descriptions. We use built-in templates and another billing program currently. We have our invoices print on letterhead. We have multiple timekeepers, including lawyers, paralegals and lawclerks. There are 6 employees that bill their time in total.

4. All of our time is billed on an hourly basis, every timekeeper's rate is different. All 6 timekeepers, plus an office manager, use Daylite and DMI heavily via a server located at our offices. We render legal services. Everyone currently keeps daily "real-time" time records in another program. I am the sole business owner. We have a relatively low number of monthly billable expenses that are not non-billable as overhead. Existing program allows us to enter disbursements similarly to the way time is entered.

5. Weekly billable reports would be useful to help monitor staff.We would want to generate them by timekeeper, client, matter, etc. Different tasks on a project get allocated to different personnel based on their skill level and expertise. One person generates the invoices, initially as prebills, then in final form. We enter time remotely using a VPN and Mac Screensharing. We do not use estimates. Though we use Daylite for contact management, mail management, and project management, we use Lawstream for billing and timekeeping. We use Apple Mail with Mailtags and, soon, MailSteward; Omnioutliner; Microsoft Office solely for Word and Excel; Keynote; and Quicken.

We need Billings to be used by multiple users on a network via a local server the same way as Daylite.

Hi

We are new to Daylite (looks brilliant and rang a certified person today to help us get trained), so have not looked at Billings yet. At first investigation it looks geared towards a much different type of company than ours. However, thought I'd answer your questions in case our situation is still of use.

1. Our customers pay a deposit and then they have to pay the balance 2 months before their holiday starts. Yes, they all pay on time but we do have to remind them to pay the balance.

2. We're not really about projects, it's a one off purchase though someone may make a repeat purchase the next year or the year after that.

3. We bill at the time of order, take the deposit and then later take the balance 2 months before the holiday starts. Though we generate the invoice on the date the holiday is booked, in accountancy terms, the date that sale is put onto the 'books' i.e. official invoice date/tax point is the holiday start date.

For regulatory reasons, all money received from our clients goes into a trust account (happens automatically when credit card payment taken) and we cannot claim the money until the holiday has finished (approx 2-3 weeks after the holiday start date) and we have to prove to the trustee that we prepaid all the suppliers before we are able to do so.

We would if possible want to use a built-in template but would need to customise to include our logo and logos of our licenses and/or use pretty colours. We don't use letterhead for the invoices we generate at the moment (in Word) but it's something we are considering as we have some very nice letterhead.

4. We sell 'products' in a way though we are a service company. Yes, we have a lot of expenses, currently we manage them for management and forecasting purposes using excel sheets and our bookkeeper puts them onto Sage. (though we are looking at using MYOB for our accounts).

5. Managing, reporting and forecasting is extremely, extremely, important to us. We do this all in Excel and the information is in a lot of different files and takes ages.

We'd want different people to be able to raise invoices, the same users who'd use Daylite.
As a company we try and have a 'virtual' model as much as possible, particularly liking software/services that can be used over the internet.

There are two frustrations I suffer with Billings that MAKE IT PRONE TO ERROR and CAUSE ME MORE WORK than they should. These features have me searching for a replacement for this software each and every time I use it. I've offered them as feedback to Market Circle a number of times.

1. Slips should be carried over from estimates to invoices BY DEFAULT, and should be carried over from estimates OR invoices to documents BY DEFAULT. I cannot tell you how many times I've printed or even emailed erroneous documents because I forgot to click on each and every slip to include it in a document or carry it forward.

2. Why on earth do comments carry over from the last document opened when preparing an estimate or invoice? Is this useful for anyone? Comments should logically carry over from the ESTIMATE to the INVOICE that goes with that estimate, not from some entirely unrelated job or client. EACH AND EVERY TIME I prepare an invoice I have to open up the PDF of the estimate, copy the text from the comments field and paste it into the invoice.

Frank

1. About your clients.
between 100 and 150 clients - 10 of them - They don't pay on time, almost never - I'd LOVE to send them reminders!

2. About your projects.
I have more than 200 projects completed - Projects are indispensable - 10 to 15 are active - I have always more than one project for client active.

3. About your billing.
I usually bill end of month - Don't collect deposit - Sometimes I work from retainer - Don't need recurring bills - I designed my own template - I have my letterhead.

4. About your work.
Sometimes hourly work - Sometimes daily - Usually per project work - Don't sell products - I track work for my company - I have lots of expenses - I track them via excel (bleah!!!)

5. About your business.
I need more than often incom reports - I's love to forecast income - I always use estimates - I use excel (again bleah!!) - Don't have account package - I'm trying to track payments but it's difficul without the right tools - I always receive electronic payments - Yes, I have at least 3 users - I share work equally - Two of us can bill clients - I'd LOOVE to bill and make ESTIMATES while out of the office - I keep track of expences with internet, via web bank.

Please support for iphone and graphic reports!!


thank you VERY much

1. About your clients.
How many clients do you have? 100 or so.

How many do you work with at one time? - usually not more than 3 or 4

Do your clients pay on time? Almost always. I carry no bad debtors

Do you have to send them reminders? Very rarely - maybe 3 or 4 in a year.

2. About your projects.
How many projects do you have? 3 or 4 per client

Do you need projects at all? Yes, this is one of the critical reasons for me using Billings

How many are active? How many are inactive? Between around 10 active, and 100 or so inactive clients

Do you have more than one project for a given client going on at the same time? Yes, 3 or 4, and sometimes more.

3. About your billing.
How do you bill (monthly, once you've reached a certain amount of money, or when the project is finished)?I bill all work in progress monthly, unless there is a good reason to hold off.

Do you collect deposits? Sometimes I collect security for my fees, which I keep in a separate account till an invoice is issued, then I transfer the funds into my operating account.

Do you work from a trust account (retainer)? No

Do you want to bill for the same things automatically and over and over? No

Do you use our built-in invoice templates, or did you design your own? Which one do you use? Do you have letterhead that you put on your invoice? I generate and save invoices using the template as it provides an easy record of the time slips invoiced. I then prepare an invoice using a template in Word, using my logo and brand style.

4. About your work.
Do you do hourly work? Daily? Other kinds of per-project? Do you sell products? Do you track work you do for yourself or your own company? Do you have a lot of expenses? How do you keep track of them? I record time using Billings as a tool for invoicing. I do not sell time, but advice, so I will often adjust my invoice from the time record to reflect value (this may mean upwards or downwards). I almost always prepare a fee estimate for major projects (MindManager by MindJet and JCV Gantt are wonderful tools for estimating and project management). I don't recover expenses, but I do need the facility to record them and recover them if necessary.

5. About your business.
Do you need income reports often? Do you want to forecast income? Do you use estimates? What other applications do you use? Do you use an accounting package? Do you track payments? Do you receive payments electronically? Do you have more than one user who wants to use Billings? Do you share work equally, or how do you divide it? Does more than one person do billing? Do you need to bill while out of the office? How do you keep track of time and expenses while out of the office? I am a sole practitioner, and do as much as I can electronically.

The one tool which I need desperately is the ability to record time against projects (and set up new projects and clients) out of the office. To do this on my iPhone is critical for me.

Anything else you can think of that might be useful for us to know is welcome. We thank you for your feedback! There are many features in Billings which I think would be good, but I don't use. I have gone off DayLite as it required me to change the way I do business too much, and I lost too much data on synchronising.

I am more interested in a tool which fits into the environment I work in (Mac), than onewhich creates its own database (DayLite).

Cheers
John

Adam,

1. Clients - I have 1,551 contacts right now of which about 590 are clients. I work with anywhere from 1 to 15 clients in a day. Generally, clients pay within 90 days of Invoicing but I do need to send regular monthly billings and we charge interest on all accounts not paid within 30 days.

2. Projects - I have 107 open projects. I DEFINITELY need the projects feature and have set up standardized activity sets for many of the projects we have going. I have 84 closed projects and would love a way to archive them. I have 10 clients with whom we have multiple projects.

3. Billing - Billing (not the software, the activity of doing it) is a pain because it is custom to each project. Some projects are flat fee, others are hourly and are billed monthly, some require a retainer and we only work against the retainer. Some projects we can't bill until they are complete. We also bill costs and expenses incurred on the clients behalf as "costs advanced." Right now I have to review all of the work-in-process each month and manually figure out who we can bill, who we can claim the retainer on and who is on hold. Would love a way to automate this process as I hate it. Right now I do billing through Quickbooks for Mac but am trying to figure out how to integrate Billings. I have modified one of the standard Invoice formats (the one that fades to blue vertically down the invoice) and am playing with Billings now to see if we get the same results as our live billing program.

4 Work - We bill hourly and flat fee. We do not sell products in the sense of a tangible thing you can touch but I often refer to the flat fee work as a product. I do track work I do for myself such as personal projects. Not so much time tracking but notes, appointments and follow up tasks. We use Quickbooks for bank reconciliations, time tracking, invoicing, accounts receivable, accounts payable and payroll expenses and a full-time bookkeeper who keeps track of it all.

5. Business - I review income reports and cashflow reports at least monthly and generally mid-month to make sure we are on track. I do forecast income and work-in-process. I've used estimates a time or two in the past month at a client request so that the client had a piece of paper to tie to the retainer they gave us. Applications we use are Daylite, Word, Excel, Quickbooks, Preview, Mail, Safari... I'm trying out Billings. I don't use forms in Daylite because we already have forms set up in Word and use the merge template in conjunction with Excel. We track payments through QB. We receive Visa, Check and Cash and have an electronic check voucher device so I guess we receive checks and Visa electronically but not through a PayPal account type system. I have 6 users who need to track their time. Right now it looks like we'd have to track tasks in Billings (because we need the pause timer feature) rather than in Daylite. If Daylite had a pause timer feature for interrupted tasks then we'd only need one copy of Billings. (Tasks are paused periodically throughout the day as we get interrupted by the phone, email or an appt but all tasks are closed out at the end of the day.)

I am trying to use the task feature in Daylite to assign workload to various staff so that everyone has the same backlog by estimating time but it's not an exact science and there are often delays outside of our control so not a perfect system.

Only one person actually does the billing, that's the bookkeeper but we all need to track out time and turn it in to her so she can put the invoices together and mail them.

We do not actually invoice while we are out of the office but we do keep track of time when we are out of the office on client business. If we are only out of the office for one day it's fairly easy to estimate time or remember time in my head and then log it on the computer at the end of the day or the next morning. If we are out for an extended period of time then I'll take a laptop and track time while I'm gone and sync when I get back. For expenses, I use Visa mostly and keep all my receipts and turn them in to the bookkeeper upon return.

6 - Critical Needs - Efficiency in task time tracking and billing that is accurate on a project by project basis. If Billings can work with Daylite that much, I can do the reminders and collections through accounting software such as QB.

I love how Daylite integrates all of the contacts that we have with a client, via email, phone, letter, appt, etc and how the tasks, reminders and activity sets keep us organized. Now, i just need that dreaded billing function to work just as seamlessly.

Thanks guys!

Erin

1. About your clients.
How many clients do you have? 10
How many do you work with at one time? 3-4
Do your clients pay on time? Yes
Do you have to send them reminders? No

2. About your projects.
How many projects do you have? 2-3 per client
Do you need projects at all? YES
How many are active? right now, 7
Do you have more than one project for a given client going on at the same time? Yes

3. About your billing.
How do you bill (monthly, once you've reached a certain amount of money, or when the project is finished)? Usually 1-3 installments per project
Do you collect deposits? Yes
Do you work from a trust account (retainer)? Sometimes
Do you want to bill for the same things automatically and over and over? No
Do you use our built-in invoice templates, or did you design your own? Customized the Swedish template using our logo

4. About your work.
Do you do hourly work? Daily? Other kinds of per-project? All of the above
Do you sell products? On occasion
Do you track work you do for yourself or your own company? Yes
Do you have a lot of expenses? YES, particularly billables for overseas travel projects (20-30 receipts per week) How do you keep track of them? Well I'd like to use Billings if I could...

5. About your business.
Do you need income reports often? No
Do you want to forecast income? No
Do you use estimates? Sometimes
What other applications do you use? Was using Quickbooks, trying to switch to just Billings + a bookkeeper
Do you use an accounting package? Not anymore
Do you track payments? Yes
Do you receive payments electronically? Yes
Do you have more than one user who wants to use Billings? Yes
Do you share work equally, or how do you divide it? Divided by effort
Does more than one person do billing? No
Do you need to bill while out of the office? Yes, but I bring my laptop
How do you keep track of time and expenses while out of the office? Trying to use billings...

Anything else you can think of that might be useful for us to know is welcome.

Grouping expenses for travel projects, along with a way to track original currency vs. billed currency would be very helpful.

I'd like to give a special thanks to all the folks who contributed to this thread. It was tremendously helpful in helping us design and prioritize the features in Billings 3.

We didn't address everything, but I think we managed to nail a lot of things down.

I'm going to close this thread now. We'll create a new one in the future.

So once again - Big Thanks!