Elegant Invoicing with Totals

These days, many people may do freelance work and regular contracting or business that requires invoicing. Getting paid is undeniably one of the most important parts of any business and invoicing is a key component of that process. Long gone are the days of handwriting invoices and mailing them. Now we have awesome ways to invoice through email and on the computer. Totals is an easy and elegant way to create invoices on your Mac.

Totals is elegant and simple. It also includes easy ways to manage your clients and create reports. If you are a company who keeps inventory, you will be happy to know that Totals helps track that too! Read on as we discover all of the ins and outs of Totals.

Setup

After purchasing Totals via the Mac App Store or the Kedisoft website, you can get started with the setup process. Upon opening the app for the first time, you will see several set up screens. On the first screen, you will have to enter your personal or business information.

After that you can choose your preferred payment type and currency. Also, you can select your Country and State/Province to select the correct tax information if adding tax is a must for you. Of course, these options are not set in stone; all of the options and more can be changed in preferences.

Features

Totals is like heaven for many people who create invoices. Totals allows you to create clients and add them to your database. When you add clients, you can give them client id numbers, enter whether they are a company or supplier, add special notes, indicate if they need tax added, and include relevant bank information. This keeps you from having to enter a ton of information each time you create an invoice.

The invoices come with a default layout. The cool thing is that Totals has a layout button which takes into a layout editor. Here, you can change the position of the name, address, and other info. You can also change colors, alignment, background, stroke, logo, and much more. You can completely customize the look and feel of your invoices, easily.

After you have created invoices and sent them out to your vendors, customers, and individuals, now you would like an easy way to track and see invoices from a certain period. Well, Totals includes that in what they call “reports.” Reports allows you to choose a certain time period and generate reports. The reports have the client id number, debits, credits, and notes. Then you could save or print the report.

If you service multiple clients, you can create multiple databases that can handle them. If you are a warehouse or supplier, you might have inventory. If you do, you are in luck! Totals has an “Inventory” tab that allows to input inventory. You can name it, add SKUs, unit price, gross, cost of good sold, tax, currency, label color, and custom fields.

Interface & Design

The interface in Totals is easy to use and refreshing. The app uses a few different ways of organizing features. The main components are located on the right in a sidebar. The sidebar is easily labeled and allows access to the most important features. Colorful icons are representative of their responsibility. You can look at a glance and tell what the categories are.

To change views (overview, report, and layouts) and access other central functions (ie. creating a new document, client, or project), Totals has a top icon bar with colorful icons. These icons allows you to change and do different functions without needing to access the menu bar and use contextual menus.

Personally, I love the design of Totals. It is better and simpler than many of the other invoicing programs I have used in the past. The way Totals is designed and interfaced, you can only use the program for simple invoicing and then if you want, you can use to track inventory and cater to multiple vendors and businesses. If you do not want to see the more advanced parts of the program, simply twirl the triangle and hide it. Totals hides other functions related to certain items with pill buttons that only come up when you select items. This way you are not bombarded with information that you do not need to see.

What’s The Competition Like?

This is where Totals really meets what I think is its downfall. There are many other apps available for Mac and on the web that either have a more robust feature set or are more affordable. For those times where you need advanced accounting and invoicing, along with expense tracking, of course, you will spend the extra $100 to get Quickbooks. If you really only need simple invoicing, you can get Express Invoicing for free.

As far as the web, Freshbooks and Sage billing are my favorite. The best part about online services is how you can send invoices right to customers through the web without saving and attaching. These different competitors really make suggesting Totals a little bit harder.

Is Totals for Me?

The answer to this question is a little difficult. I would say that if you are an individual or a small business, this program is for you. Do not get confused that this can also double as accounting software like a program such as Quickbooks, it cannot.

While it can do an adequate job at inventory, it is nothing spectacular. The thing is, Totals does an excellent job at doing the basic invoicing and allows you to handle multiple clients and make reports. When it comes to more small to medium business level inventory, accounting or reports, Totals is not as impressive as other alternatives. It can be capable, it would just need a little updating to make it more feature complete.

For what I do, which is simple invoicing, it allows me to keep track of everything. Totals is $39.99 and out of 10 stars I give it a 7. With the competition and many free alternatives that could do more or less the same thing, the developers of Totals will really have to step up their game in order for it to really have a place in this market.