Mac at Work

Chapter 18

Billing and Invoicing

Using the applications in this book, you are doing some great work on your Mac. So how about getting paid? That’s where billing and invoicing software comes in, to track your product (whatever that may be) and who pays for it. There are several Mac products to do so, including accounting packages, which manage all the financial aspects of your business, to more focused packages that track just your time. This chapter looks at some of the best billing and invoicing options and answers the question of what to do if you are working in an office that requires QuickBooks for Windows.

QuickBooks

 QuickBooks, published by Intuit Software, is the default billing and invoicing software package for most small and medium companies. Just like most graphics designers learn their trade on a Mac, most bookkeepers and CPAs learn the ropes using QuickBooks on a Windows PC.

QuickBooks for Mac ($200; http://quickbooks.intuit.com/product/accounting-software/mac-accounting-software) is Intuit’s Mac-friendly version of QuickBooks. QuickBooks has an erratic history on the Mac. For the longest time, QuickBooks on the Mac felt like a poor quality port of prior releases of QuickBooks for Windows. Most Mac offices that relied on QuickBooks kept around one Windows PC for no other reason but to run QuickBooks. Indeed, some Mac offices still do this.

More recently, Intuit tried ...