Marketcircle announces Billings Pro, needs beta testers

As a company owner who used Daylite/Daylite Touch for a bit longer than a year, I have to take some issue with MarketCircle's position as a darling of Mac development.

A few (very broad) issues we encountered using Daylite:

The Daylite interface is cluttered and unfocused, with so many interface elements vying for attention and little uniqueness to the different areas that it is difficult many times to pay attention to relevant data. Sidebars and selection lists occupy large swaths of the window, and getting the software to remember what *not* to show - or trying to make them go away entirely - is an exercise in frustration.

I can't stress this enough: Daylite's interface is really poor. It is cluttered, restrictive, and gets in the way more than it facilitates good business practice. A company could be as effective - and more flexible - by using linked spreadsheets to store and manipulate their data.

Daylite is, mostly, a first-rate relational database display. Selecting a record in the software shows me other records that are related to it, but doesn't grant me a whole lot more insight than that. Varied and integrated overviews of what my business looks like now, in the past, and what I project in the future are missing or lacking. Designing and executing projects gives me a list of tasks and little more. It's drill-down, drill-down, drill-down, ad nauseum. I was railing against that kind of software design 10 years ago and more, and most everyone else has moved on past it by now. I'd like to see Daylite do the same and become something more.

Finally, an issue relevant to only a small subset of their users: their move to PostgreSQL for their back-end database was trumpeted as a great new feature of Daylite 3.9. Outside of some performance enhancements - which I can't speak to, as there wasn't a noticeable difference to us - it was an almost meaningless change. They hobbled, crimped, twisted, and restricted the Postgres installation so horribly that it was A) unserviceable in the case of problems even by a knowledgeable person, and B) completely locked off from any kind of access by third-party tools. Would you like customer requests from your website to automatically populate this wonderful and not-inexpensive system you're using to manage your main business functions? No dice. Want clients to be able to see the status of their projects? No go unless they're using Macs and you're going to pay for a license for them. In the forums, MarketCircle rebuffed requests to open access to the database with the claim that they wouldn't do so because they couldn't support changes people might make to the data. Not a problem: I don't expect you to support that. How about an API, then? No to that request, too. That lack of openness or willingness to allow Daylite to be connected into extended business systems was ultimately a killing blow to the product for us.

For the Mac platform, there isn't a whole lot to which Daylite compares; this means that MarketCircle holds a strong position right now. But, that doesn't mean that their software is god's gift to business or that it isn't significantly flawed. Until they change their design and execution philosophy, MarketCircle is a company whose products we won't use.

I seriously hope Billings becomes *nothing* like Daylite. MarketCircle's client server model is extraordinarily clunky. It's slow, prone to syncing problems and should you accidentally forget to log off on your desktop before you head out to a meeting, you're out of luck because you won't be able to log in on your laptop.

Moreover, I'd rather they fixed their existing applications before venturing off into new territory. Their iPhone stuff is unremarkable and overpriced and, really, they should have focused on fixing their desktop products before ever producing the mobile stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I like Billings. I use it every day and it's my favorite invoicing app on any platform. But it's got issues and I'd rather see them addressed before focusing on yet another new product.

ah great news - multi user is prolly the most requested feature

I think the official billings app is still in a beta ... i had purchased it but the are some major errors in it. Once those are fixed i think the app is good

Before starting a Pro version they should get the normal version straight. Everyone who's ever tried to create their own template know what I'm talking about.

Since people ask for a german translations for what ... 2 years now? And there were a lot of helping hands in their forums but they didn't really make it, i can't use their software. I understand english very well, but having all the stuff on the bill written in english confuses german costumers.

So, even though the software is very good, no future for me until they finally get a germany translation running.