Invoice - 3.0.3

This program almost got things right.

Unfortunately, it's terribly buggy: I used it for less than two hours and encountered frequent bizarre and unexpected behavior (often requiring me to restart the program, through it never explicitly crashed), and once a mysterious message that my data could not be saved, resulting in a loss of everything I'd entered recently.

It has a convenient "tasks" tab to add tasks (items charged hourly) to a project, but no similar way to add flat-rate items (such as expenses) to a project - those must be added directly to a particular invoice, which makes them hard to track down later unless you open and look at each invoice. And the only way to add a task to an invoice is to create a new invoice with the task on it - adding a task to a preexisting invoice doesn't appear to be possible.

The layout designer for invoice templates is a clever idea but isn't implemented well; the program would be better off not trying to be both an invoicing AND page layout program. When every info item requires its own text field, how do you set up a single line of text that is a sequence of items - such as the very basic "City, State Zip"? Why not leave the page layout to a text editor and just use delimited tags for the info items like other programs do? This is what made me finally just give up.

Some contextual menus would be nice, too.

There are a myriad other little quirks I ran into in my ~2 hours with this software. Most I could probably get used to, others I'm sure I'd find workarounds for. Some of my problems might be chalked up to lack of knowledge about the software (the help didn't help. It's extremely cursory and doesn't even cover some items, like the "catalog").

That said, I really wanted to like this program. The interface, when it worked right and with the aforementioned exceptions, was generally clear and simple. It does quotes, which was the initial attraction for me. The catalog, once I figured it out, was a great feature. This software has great potential and I'll definitely be checking up on it now and again.

I like this application and bought a copy. However, it won't recognise the supplied serial number.

It's now 4:20PM GMT on 18th Feb 2008. I've sent an email and sent a message on the 'issue tracking system'. I'll come back here if/when I get a reply from the developer.