Warning: this post is a shameless commercial promotion.
I have a secret. I have been working on an IPhone app. I am proud to announce that it’s finished and for sale in the App Store. Current price: $4.99. It’s called Bill It.
The Problem
I created Bill It because I needed it myself. I am a consultant, and I use QuickBooks to bill my clients. The edition of QuickBooks that I use comes with a nice time entry feature that makes it pretty easy to bill my clients based on time and materials. But it’s inconvenient to open QuickBooks whenever I want to record my time. But if I wait, I forget, and that’s bad. I have used various mobile apps to capture my time — first on a Palm device, then on my IPhone. But this presents a different problem: double entry. It’s a hassle to transcribe hours from one screen to another, but the real problem is accuracy. Each transcription carries with it a small risk of error. Billing errors are bad.
The Solution
So I created Bill It. Bill It lets me enter my time on the go with no friction. The time is accurate because I enter it when it’s fresh in my mind. When billing time rolls around, it’s a couple of taps to send myself an email with a file attached. I open QuickBooks, and with a few clicks the time is imported. No fear of errors, and very little hassle.
Bill It Lite
A pet peeve of mine is paying for an app that I will never use. Even if it’s only a buck. On the other hand I don’t mind paying a premium price for an app I will use regularly. So I created Bill It Lite, which lets users try out every aspect of Bill It before they pay for it. Another pet peeve is when I try out a lite version only to realize that I must redo a bunch of setup and data entry when I buy the full version. Not with Bill It Lite. Users can buy the full version right in the app. No new app. No redoing setup and data entry.
You might also be interested to know that I developed Bill It using MonoTouch and Catnap.
I want an app that allows multiple clients to enter their ‘use of a resource’ time into QBs over the iPhone app and then I would invoice the clients for the use of the resources. Can Bill It do that?
Comment by Jim — September 29, 2011 @ 7:09 am
Jim,
Hmm, maybe. Bill It is intended for the consultant (you) to enter the time that you want to bill to your clients. However, I guess your clients could have Bill It on their phones, and they could enter the time that they want you to bill them for. They could then periodically export time entries from Bill It and send the file to you to import into QB.
The setup might be a bit of a headache. In the normal, case, you export a couple of files from QB and import them into Bill It. One import handles the basic settings. The other import sets up all clients, projects and services exactly as they are in QB. For the second one, you would edit the export for each client to remove all the other clients. Or you could give them instructions to set up Bill It manually. The former is a pain for you. The latter leaves the chance of errors.
Comment by Tim Scott — September 29, 2011 @ 1:50 pm
I’m having problems importing Bill It data into Quickbooks 2012. QB says that the import file was created using an old version of QB timer and then when I try to import it anyway I get a message stating “Error on line 10> Imported record has an invalid date. It should be MM/DD/YY” and then the data is not imported successfully.
Comment by Jody — January 16, 2012 @ 4:53 pm