Daylite & Billings

I had a lovely chin wag with photographer Paul Painter over at Painter Creative last week. Whilst chewing the fat on this, that and the other he showed me some rather interesting software from Market Circle, Daylite and Billings. I'd had a look around for various studio management/ invoicing software on a couple of occasions but never found any that seemed to suit my requirements. A lot of software on the market will do some tasks but then requires you to have several, incompatible programmes running at the same time.

Having installed a trial of Daylite last week I have to say I'm very impressed. Has too many functions and uses for different company set ups for me to go into but here's some of the main features I'm using which will help make my workflow a lot more organised.

Storing Contacts: Has a great, easy to navigate system for importing contacts and linking them to specific groups; IE web developers, recruitment agencies etc, organisations (so you can keep track on multiple contacts within the same company), or prospective clients/ leads. It will automatically link contacts to any projects you have set up with them, so you can get an overview of who is putting what your way.

Groups: Also very useful for setting up mailing/ newletter lists.

Opportunities: This section is great and means I can effectively keep track of all the random enquires or make notes of any possible leads worth chasing; bye bye to my 10+ sprawling Excel sheets, you won't be missed.

Projects: Create custom 'pipelines' with the different stages involved for different jobs, so at a glance I can see where I'm at on a project and if time schedules are slipping.

Calendar: Syncs with iCal but I've got it set up to only show my work related appointments and notes so I can stay in work mode.

Billings is a separate piece of software that integrates with Daylite to send out and track estimates, invoices and payments. Only downloaded this yesterday so a bit early to comment although I'm finding customising the invoice templates to match my previous ones a bit of a nightmare. Think I need some more time to get my head round it. One feature which is great is the timer to keep track of hours worked. I currently use a desktop widget but Billings timer lets you specify several projects to time for and also uploads the data straight into your job file so you can effectively track costs (if you bill hourly) and also compare how accurate your estimate was.

Daylite costs £129.00 per user so not an insignificant outlay and has a lot of features you need to take time to explore to make it worth the cost. However I do think by the time my trial version is up I'm likely to think 'what would I do without it'. Billings is a lot cheaper at £29 as it's a more straight forward programme but I'll reserve judgement on that till I've played around a bit more, though I'm thinking it's worth it for the time tracking functions alone.

Anyone with any experience of these or similar products please drop in a comment.