By Bastian Woelfle:
Today I am going to talk about something pretty uncommon: Invoicing.
Invoicing is probably one of the things you don’t want to do, and most of the Mac users probably never have to. But if you ever need something that will help you to create and manage invoices, you are going to love Invoice 3 from Kedisoft.
The first thing you see of Invoice 3 is its beautiful user interface you would never expect from an invoicing app. It is a native Cocoa application with the typical Mac look and feel.
At first you set up your clients in the built in address book. A client can either be an individual person or a company. To create an invoice, simply select a client and click the new invoice Button. The same applies to Quotations, a click on the new Quotation button creates one.
Besides invoicing you can manage your inventory inside Invoice 3. This makes it possible to simply drag stuff from your inventory onto a new invoice. If you don’t care about inventory it is of course possible to deactivate it.
Taxes can be defined per item and can always be changed. As well as the description and prices. If entered before, you can see your purchase price inside each item, like this you always know how much rebate you can offer a client without loosing money. Speaking of money, you can change the currency on the fly, which is very handy if you sell to different countries.
To get the invoice to your client, you can either print it or simply get a PDF for archiving and emailing invoices. As soon as your invoice is done it will show up in the invoice list which has some handy features too. Invoices are colored differently depending on their status. Unpaid invoices are red, paid ones are green and upcoming invoices are grey. Above the list you have a pie chart of you balance. Inside the list you can create smart folders filtering on status, date and so on. The pie chart is adjusted depending on the folder you are in. To keep track of unpaid stuff even easier, you can create reminders for certain occasions.
I run a small web hosting service and in my opinion the next feature alone is worth the entire price of Invoice 3: Recurring invoices. If you need to bill something every day/week/month/or other interval, you can make an invoice recurring. Like this, Invoice 3 will create new invoice whenever needed. Awesome!
The application comes with a few invoice templates, but with the built in template editor you can create your own templates easily or modify the included ones.
On their website you can download a really nice user manual that shows about every functionality Invoice 3 has. But just in case you ever run into a problem you will find that even the support is terrific, I always got answers within a few hours.
Alas, all this awesomeness is not that cheap but the USD 99 Invoice 3 costs are pretty fair looking at what you get. If you ever think you might somehow need an invoicing app, go to kedisoft.com and download the 30 days trial.
