Billings automatically adds a 30-day due date, so you don’t have to break out a calendar.

We thought we had a handle on our business expenses, invoices, deadlines, and missing payments, but Billings 3 proved us wrong. This small-business software so thoroughly reorganized our bookkeeping that we’re embarrassed to even imagine our previous system based on scraps of paper and (hopefully good) luck. Billings can keep track of completed and in-progress work and report which projects are due, the total amount of money you’re owed, who’s late in making a payment, and more at any given moment. The simple interface demands only minimal effort, making Billings ideal for people who shun the management that comes with running a business.

Billings imports client info from Address Book, and you’ll initially associate one Client with a given Project—which can have deadlines and notes. But you’ll keep track of the details in Working Slips. These customizable entries log your work and expenses. The app can track your work on a flat-rate or hourly basis using the included timer. You can even tally total mileage and let Billings itemize costs on a per-trip basis. These options serve most needs, although we wanted just a little more flexibility, such as keeping internal track of the time we spent on a quantity-based project. As you enter data, Billings tracks deadlines and project progress. Once a Project is completed, the monetary totals switch over from “incomplete” to “unbilled.”

When finished with a project, Billings assembles professional-looking invoices from your data. Choose from a few dozen stock designs, modify a template, or create one from scratch. We tailored one of the included designs to suit our needs, modifying the line for an invoice number to automatically generate our own reference code and adding a custom text line to thank our clients. Billings slurps in your own contact info along with the client details, and then itemizes and totals your fees and expenses into a PDF invoice. When clients make payments, you can update your financial picture in Billings with just a few clicks.

While Billings is accessible to beginners and offers deep customization, occasional bugs and omissions leave room for improvement. We encountered a bug when importing clients with multiple addresses, where Billings selected home instead of work details, and there were a few problems with adding invoice amounts to ongoing totals. We figured out most of the Mac-friendly interface just by poking around, but we couldn’t select multiple items like we would in other apps.