What is Billings 3*?

Billings 3 is an excellent billing and invoicing tool, which is solely for Mac OS X 10.4 and higher (now, OS X Lion). The following article is my own review of the software after using it.

Once installed, which is an easy enough task, my first step was to see if there were any software updates before I used it. Intuitively, I visited the Billings Menu—and clicked on Check for Updates—and within a couple of minutes, the software was updated.

Before proceeding, I would strongly advise that you go to the Help Menu, then read through the Billings 3 Guide. At first, I didn’t do this and instead just got myself confused when trying to work it out myself—especially regarding the use of Timers (which I will come to later on).

How to use Billings…

One of the first steps I made when using billings was to set up a client. This can be done easily—and your clients can also be imported form the Mac Address Book application.

Once a client is chosen, you simply create a new project, with various other options that are very intuitive to follow. From there, you create Working Slips (which are the line-items on an invoice). Once these simple steps are complete, you are able to start working on a project—keeping track of every minute you spend working on it. What’s good about this software is that these slips can be timed at a flat fee—or by the minute.


Screenshot of Billings Copyright of MarketCircle | *By Affiliate.

Timers

This takes me to the subject of Timers. You can easily set-up a timer that corresponds to each working slip on a given project to record how much time you have spent working on it. For example, if I was working on a project that required internet research, I could create a timer (which handily appears in the Mac menu bar), simply clicking on it like a stop-watch to record how long you’ve spent on a task—and it will be billed accordingly in an invoice.

Invoices

Once all working slips on a particular project are complete, you simply create an invoice and send it to a client. There are many professional templates to choose from, or you can create your own from scratch (with your logo on, etc).

There is also a wealth of information contained in the left sidebar, which amongst other things, shows the balances which are overdue in red. The accounting software is professional, too, with retainer and tax options galore—but all displayed with ease-of-use in mind.

Conclusion

All-in-all, Billings 3 is a very powerful, but relatively easy piece of software to use. As long as you spend time reading the main points of the user manual first, it doesn’t take long to start using the software, which is a really useful—and indispensable tool that you may wonder how you’ve done without all this time.

This is quite a simple review, and there are many aspects of the software that I have yet to use and experiment with. That-said, I know that this software is now on it’s 3rd version, with many amendments made to it by MarketCircle to make this software the best it can be. I know that when I need to use the other varied software options contained in Billings, they will aid me effectively.

Do I recommend this software? Yes. In a nut-shell, it has professional invoicing capabilities, easy-to-use project management and because it’s made for Mac, looks great (especially the red PAID stamp, see image above). I think I’ll be using this software as long as I have a Mac, which will be until the day I stop designing! You can download Billings 3 from MarketCircle on thier site, Billingsapp.com.

This post is Copyright Andrew Kelsall, author of the Andrew Kelsall Graphic Design Blog.Andrew Kelsall | Creative Designer - Graphic Design Blog of Andrew Kelsall

Web Design Quotes available on this site.

Recently, I read an article about em measurements instead of pixels for the type in CSS StyleSheets. So, thinking it would be simple enough, I set about changing all the type settings in my Golive CS StyleSheet. I used an easy conversion I read about – whereby you set the body of the text to 62.5%, then, say 10px equates to 1em..and 16px becomes 1.6em and so on. Well, as stated, this was quite easy taking me about 10 minutes to complete.

Recently, I read an article about em measurements instead of pixels for the type in CSS StyleSheets. So, thinking it would be simple enough, I set about changing all the type settings in my Golive CS StyleSheet. I used an easy conversion I read about – whereby you set the body of the text to 62.5%, then, say 10px equates to 1em..and 16px becomes 1.6em and so on. Well, as stated, this was quite easy taking me about 10 minutes to complete.

By the way, to set the Body Text Size to 62.5 percent (%), just type it in the ’size’ box in your style sheet for the Body Tag. See the image below:

However, once this process was complete and I reviewed all the pages in my site, I was baffled to find that only a small number of my web site pages were displaying the type sizes correctly. The rest of the pages were showing the new ‘ems’ type settings at about double the size they should be. After searching the code on my pages for literally HOURS, and compared the code of the pages that DID work against the ones which didn’t, I noticed something odd.

The Docutype declaration on the pages that DID work was different. This was the Doctype displayed:
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>

But the Docutype declaration on the pages that DID NOT work had the W3.org web address missing at the end, like this:
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”>

I’m no web -coding expert, so I don’t know why this error made my CSS StyleSheet stop working, but it did.I hope this article helps anyone who is having the same or similar problem that I did. So, if you are having problems troubleshooting text size on your stylesheet, I hope this helps.

I PREVIOUSLY WROTE AND PUBLISHED THIS POST ON ANOTHER BLOG. I HAVE NOW MOVED IT HERE TO THIS PAGE, SO COMMENTS ARE NOT OPEN ON THIS POST

This post is Copyright Andrew Kelsall, author of the Andrew Kelsall Graphic Design Blog.Andrew Kelsall | Creative Designer - Graphic Design Blog of Andrew Kelsall