Customer Reviews

Macware MacFreelance

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

MacFreelance bills itself as 'Invoice and billing software made for Creative Professionals'. Having recently taken on a consulting job, I thought this might just be the software to make things in my life a bit simpler. I don't have any experience with other hour-tracking/billing software on the Mac, so

In the box, you'll receive a CD and a brief, ten-page Quick Reference Guide. Installation of the software is simple and on par with most any other program - open the disc, drag the program to your applications folder. Simple and easy.

Once you open the program, you're presented with the main window of the program, which presents a series of icons along the top edge and shows you clients, projects and ongoing charges tied to those projects. The first thing you'll want to do is set up your business. You can do business and send bills out as John Q. Public, as CreativePublic LLC, or under whatever name suits. You can enter multiple businesses for various project or clients with ease. Importing from the Address Book is also possible.

After getting whom you'll be billing as sorted out, you can now move onto adding clients. You can accomplish this by either double-clicking in the 'Clients' field, clicking on the Clients icon along the top bar, or through the menu system. While there are a variety of ways to accomplish this task, I found this to be somewhat cumbersome: double-clicking in the clients field isn't mentioned anywhere, and I stumbled on it by chance; the clients icon in the top bar is grayed out at various times for reasons not immediately apparent. That said, once you have the clients window up, it is simple to add clients, either manually or from the Address Book. You can also configure how invoicing is handled and which company or companies you use to bill the client.

Setting up projects is simpler and more straight forward than the troubles I encountered with clients, though not without some quirks. To add a new project, simply click the '+' button below the Projects field. You can title the project and enter any additional information in the tab below, who will bill the project, whether to produce a quote, tax information, mileage, discounts and add any dates to the calendar in iCal. Adding various Timed Items or Fixed (rate) Items is straight forward. The program does not allow you to add new items when you've got the clock running, as you wouldn't want to be billing for administrative activities, now, would you?

Once you're set up, you can start working. MacFreelance puts a small icon in the upper right-hand menu-bar icons where you can start and stop time-tracking for any hourly projects you've set up. You can also bring up a larger Task Monitor window to keep track of information. Finally, you can also start and stop timing from the main program window.

Once you've finished a project, or at least come to the point where you need to create an invoice, MacFreelance provides a variety of options. You can customize your invoice header and information through the program preferences. With your invoice preview created, you can easily print or email it out. MacFreelance also has an invoice book which allows you to keep track of the outstanding bills, advances, paid bills, and any other tracking information you might need. The main window in the program also has a Statistics tab which gives a variety of time worked, billed, paid and other information in concise form.

Mileage tracking, which is a must for some projects, is also available. This feature is initially disabled and must be turned on in the preferences. You can track either through the entry of actual mileage or odometer readings. Entering miles traveled was simple, though I could not figure out how to enter the odometer readings into the program, and the help function was of little help, other than to let me know the feature was there and how to enable it.

Generally, I found the software to be adequate. MacFreelance integrates with a number of other applications seamlessly, which makes for simple billing and calendaring. The program itself has some frustrating user interface inconsistencies which keep it from achieving its full potential. Additionally, the help features are relatively thin and not completely up to speed with current version of MacFreelance. With some time to gain familiarity, MacFreelance will enable you to easily take care of invoice and billing tasks, but some of the features are not intuitive. With a few changes, I feel MacFreelance could go from adequate to quite good.

After seeing the reviews I decided to download the demo and see for myself before buying the product. I was pretty disappointed. The interface seems to try and cram as many features as possible and the result is an unintuitive mess. At the price it might be a decent piece of software that gets the job done if you're willing to figure out how it all works, but definitely get the demo and see if it works for you before buying.

Seems like a simple enough product, however, MacFreelance fails to deliver on any of its promises.

After installing the software and setting up a few test jobs, I thought I had the hang of it. I then added a handful of real jobs, closed the program and went about other business. Later, upon reopening the program, I realized that all of the information I had spent time inputting was gone.

I emailed macXware (because there is no customer support phone number), and they told me I had to install an update. I did, and again, everything seemed to be working. I then repeated all of the entries I had made, ran reports, everything seemed to be fine.

Too good to be true. Once I quit the program and reopened it, everything was gone--AGAIN!

Now, I've emailed the tech support, again, but I've gotten no response. Since that is the only option to request support it looks like I'm fat out of luck, and several hours of my busy day.

I'm furious with the false promises made by this product, and I highly recommend avoiding the frustration I've experiences by not purchasing this item.

I would highly not recommend purchasing this, it's a near complete waste of time. I've put up with it for over a year now, and am finally ditching it.

- Bugs are too numerous to list, but a few dealbreakers - records time incorrectly, or erases the time that you have spend all day recording, and reporting is highly error-prone and innacurate
- Has no online, mobile or even dashboard widget integration, forget recording house unless you are sitting in front of the computer that it is installed on
- Expect zero response from customer service, it simply does not exist.

I could go on, but hopefully that is enough to convince you. I wish I hadn't invested all the time in it I did.

Be careful - don't hit "skip" when the start-up wizard pops up, or you'll never be able to get back to it. And good luck getting support. There is no support phone number and you're lucky to get a response after waiting several days from their e-mail support. I'd reconsider before ever buying a software product from a company that's too cheap to provide phone support for its products.

Unless you have unlimited time and patience to work with a program and a bare-bones manual (they call it a "Quick Reference Guide" -- and it is quick only because it is nearly useless) don't waste your money. I spent hours trying to figure out basic layout of my invoice so that the company return address was in the upper left -- instead of the upper right to which it seems to default -- so that I could use window envelopes to send invoices. And my company logo seems to default to the middle of the page. Who ever heard of that? Thanks, but no thanks. Clumsy as Quickbooks for Mac is, I'll stick with it because it's orders of magnitude better than this piece of junk.

MacFreelance has updated itself a few times since the following review was written, and is now much more stable. There is still the occasional problem, but it does the job when it comes to basic bookkeeping for freelancers. Paring this app with the Dropbox service really makes it shine, by keeping your info updated between machines.

Original Review:
This is unacceptable. The software itself would be fine, but I can't count the hours I've spent re-writing invoices that couldn't be saved.

This bug is crippling and I would not recommend this software to anybody, until it's fixed.

I had been using MS Excel to track time and then send invoices. However, without a good way to track what invoices were sent and what payments had been received I found myself wondering if I had been paid for all of the jobs completed. I needed a comprehensive means to track the time spent on the project as well as the status of each monthly invoice. MacFreelance from www.macxware.com did the trick - and did it with style.

After researching several freelance project timers I found MacFreelance the easiest to use and the most comprehensive. Though the help file is very slim, I found I did not need it to get up and running right away.

After the install I quickly added my first client, several projects, and then was able to start timing my first project.

It would be helpful to know that you can make entering projects easier by setting up your user preferences (I guess that's true of most software) as it will help in getting your standard fees and structure in for all of your projects.

Now my clients can know exactly what I spent time doing, and I can know that the Invoice has been sent ad if payment has been received.

I highly recommend this product to anyone that needs to track time or expenses for any size business. Very easy to use and covers all of the basics.

This product is not intuitive at all. In fact, it's amost impossible to figure out. It has the feel of a cludgy PC program ported over to the Mac with no thought given to the end product and very little enthusiasm for doing it.

I've been using this product for five months. It's quirky, but I've adapted to it by using it only in the most minimal of ways. (For instance, I'll spend 20 minutes entering data for a job, only to reopen the program and find it gone, but if I enter the info and then keep MacFreelance open another 10-15 minutes it will Save the data. That sort of thing.) But last Thursday there was a massive problem: I deleted a job, only to find that ALL my fixed-price jobs were deleted. Half my billing records over five months, gone. I emailed MacFreelance Support (you won't find the info in the box; you've gotta sleuth for it online) and they haven't responded, other than emailing me a Support Ticket Number. If you have another invoicing option than MacFreelance I recommend you give it a whirl.