MacFreelance review

MacFreelance is a simple time-tracking and invoicing application for creative professionals.

Its project-based workflow will be instantly familiar to freelancers. Clients - whose details can be manually created or imported from Address Book - are displayed in the left-hand pane of the program window, with associated projects shown below. Tasks for each project are listed on the right.

Each client can have individual settings such as invoice discounts to be applied. Even better, as the program supports multiple identities, you can send invoices to clients under different names. You can choose a default for each client, although you can select an identity at the invoicing stage.

MacFreelance lets you create timed or fixed-rate tasks, as well as charges and expenses such as mileage. You start tracking time either by clicking on a toolbar button, a menubar icon or a small Task Monitor window that shows task duration and ongoing balance, as well as related notes. But unlike the beta version of Billings 3 we reviewed last year, we could only track one task at a time. While that will only disappoint the most ardent of multi-taskers, the timer fell down in other ways, too. Selecting a different timed task in the window stopped the active timer with little warning, and it lacks the handy idle time monitor in Billings that offers to pause the timer if you stop working on your Mac.

But MacFreelance does offer eye-catching features of its own. A Statistics drawer pulls out of the main window to summarise all income and expenses related to the current client. This can be subdivided into open, billed and paid categories, so you can see a client's balance at a glance.

Creating invoices is easy too, although not without glitches. To send an invoice to a client, you simply select it in the Projects pane and click on the toolbar's Invoice button. You can also merge billable time for all open projects into one invoice by selecting 'All' in the Projects pane. In the resulting window projects and tasks can be collapsed into a single list or kept under separate project headings. MacFreelance shows a preview of the invoice and lets you save it to email, print, save to disk or add to an Invoice Book, which stores a preview of the invoice.

While MacFreelance usually automatically offered to mark open tasks as billed, it didn't do this for multiple-project invoices, so you may have to manually mark billed items. We couldn't set up a recurring invoice either, although a compensation is iCal integration, which can automatically set an iCal alarm to remind you when an invoice is due.

Invoices are only mildly customisable. You can add logos and specify a typeface for each of its component sections, but further personalisation is limited and there's no way to design your own invoice.

MacFreelance is a handy and easy-to-use time tracker with a great deal of potential. Unfortunately, it isn't as powerful, nor yet as polished, as Billings 3.