Billed Review: Invoicing, Time Tracking & Expenses Tool

What Is Billed and Why Does It Exist?

Billed positions itself as a one-stop shop for everything related to getting paid. It bundles invoicing, estimates, time tracking, and expense management into a single platform — the kind of tool that tries to replace the patchwork of apps many freelancers and small teams rely on.

The deal that caught my attention is the AppSumo lifetime offer starting at just $49 for the base tier. That entry-level plan is what I used to put Billed through its paces, and it covers the core features most solo operators actually need. Higher tiers unlock extras like multiple workspaces, OCR receipt scanning, and an AI assistant, with pricing that goes all the way up to $700 for the top-end package.

Dashboard and Multi-Business Support

The Billed dashboard gives you a clean overview of your business activity — outstanding invoices, recent payments, and key metrics at a glance. It's the kind of layout you'd expect from a modern SaaS tool: nothing groundbreaking, but functional and easy to parse.

One standout feature is multi-business support. From tier two and above, you can manage multiple businesses from a single Billed account and switch between them by clicking your logo in the upper corner. If you run more than one business or want to offer invoicing as a service to clients, that's a genuinely useful capability. Tier one limits you to a single workspace, which is fair given the $49 price point.

Managing Clients and Items

Setting up clients is straightforward. The client section lives in the left sidebar, and adding a new client is just a matter of filling out a simple form with their name, email, address, and whatever other details you want to include. You can be as thorough or as minimal as you like.

Items — your products and services — live under the settings area rather than the main sidebar, which is a slightly unintuitive placement. Each item gets a title, sale price, purchase price, tax rate, and description. If you're onboarding with Billed for the first time, the smart move is to load all your clients and all your products or services before you start creating invoices. That way everything is ready to pull in when you need it.

Custom Fields for Flexible Data

Where Billed gets interesting is its custom fields system. You can add additional fields to virtually any module in the tool — clients, invoices, estimates, expenses, projects, and tasks. Need to track a client's website URL? Add a custom text field. Selling products that come in different colors? Create a radio-button field on your items.

Each custom field can be set as required or optional, and you choose the field type (text, radio, dropdown, etc.) when you create it. It's a small feature, but it gives Billed a level of flexibility that helps it adapt to different business workflows rather than forcing you into a rigid structure.

Payment Methods: Stripe, PayPal, and Mollie

Billed supports three payment processors: Stripe, PayPal, and Mollie. Mollie is the newest addition and extends coverage to more countries and payment methods across Europe. Between the three options, most businesses should be able to find a processor that works in their region.

Connecting a payment method is done through the settings, and once it's linked, you can assign it to individual invoices or set it as the default for recurring billing. There's nothing complicated here — it's connect and go.

Creating and Sending Invoices

The invoicing workflow is the heart of Billed. Creating an invoice starts with selecting a client, then adding line items from your pre-loaded products and services (or creating new ones on the fly). You set rates, quantities or hours, and the total calculates automatically. Tax and discount options are built in — you can apply flat-rate or percentage-based discounts per invoice.

Recurring invoices are handled nicely. Toggle the recurring switch on any invoice and you can set the frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly), choose the payment method, define how many billing cycles to run, and even have invoices automatically emailed to the client. For anyone billing retainers or subscription-style services, this is a major time saver.

One thing to watch out for: the default date format may not match your locale. I found it set to day/month/year, which would confuse most U.S.-based clients. Fortunately, you can change this in the general settings, and it updates existing invoices retroactively.

Invoice Templates and Client Experience

Billed offers three invoice templates, and while there's no live preview when selecting one (you have to save and then check your invoice), all three are clean and professional. The templates differ mainly in layout and styling rather than functionality.

From the client's perspective, invoices open via a public link in the browser. They can print the invoice, download it as a PDF, or proceed to payment directly. The loading speed was a bit sluggish in my testing — elements like the logo and buttons rendered one at a time rather than all at once. It's not a dealbreaker, but it could feel unprofessional if a client notices the staggered loading. The "Subscribe" button label for recurring invoices could also be clearer — something like "Proceed to Payment" would set better expectations.

Estimates That Convert to Invoices

Before an invoice is an invoice, it often starts as an estimate. Billed's estimate builder mirrors the invoice creator almost exactly — you pick a client, add items, and send it off. The difference is that estimates don't carry a due date or payment obligation.

When you send an estimate to a client, they can accept or reject it right from their browser. An accepted estimate can then be converted to a live invoice with a single click from the admin panel under "More Actions." You can also duplicate estimates, preview them, or download PDFs from that same dropdown. It's a clean workflow that removes the friction of manually recreating documents when a deal moves forward.

Projects and Task Management

For anyone who bills by the hour rather than flat rates, Billed includes a project management layer. Each project gets assigned to a client, can include multiple team members, and contains individual tasks with priority levels and budget estimates.

Creating a project is simple: give it a name, assign a client, set a color for visual organization, and define whether it's billable by default. Tasks within the project can be marked as low, normal, high, or critical priority, and each one can carry its own budget estimate. Once tasks are complete, you can generate an invoice directly from the project — Billed pulls in completed tasks and their associated costs automatically.

The task-based billing option is particularly useful. When you create an invoice from a project, you choose between billing by tracked time or by completed tasks. Either way, the line items are pre-populated, which saves a lot of manual data entry.

Time Tracking: Manual, Timer, and Chrome Extension

Billed gives you three ways to track time. The first is manual entry through the left sidebar — pick a project and task, type in the hours, set the date, and mark it as billable. This works well if you're logging time after the fact or estimating effort on completed work.

The second option is the built-in timer in the upper-right corner of the app. Click it, let it run while you work, then pause and assign the tracked time to a project and task. The third option is a Chrome extension that works similarly to the in-app timer but lets you track time while browsing or working in other web apps.

Time entries show up in daily, weekly, and monthly views, giving you a clear picture of where your hours are going. One minor bug I ran into: trying to create a new task directly from the time tracking dropdown didn't work — the "create new task" option appeared but clicking it did nothing. You'll want to set up your tasks in advance to avoid that issue.

Teams, Permissions, and Reporting

You can invite team members and assign them one of four permission levels: admin, manager, employee, or contractor. Each role comes with different access rights, so you can control who sees financial data, who can create invoices, and who's limited to just tracking their own time. The tier one plan supports up to three team members, which is enough for most solo operators or very small teams.

The reporting section rounds out the feature set with views for invoice details, item sales, expense reports, payment summaries, and time entry breakdowns. It's not the most advanced reporting suite out there, but it covers the basics you'd need to understand your business finances and team productivity at a glance.

Plans, Pricing, and What Each Tier Gets You

The AppSumo deal breaks down into five tiers. Tier one ($49) gets you three team members, one workspace, and branding removal. Tier two adds 10 team members and five workspaces. Tier three bumps team members to unlimited and workspaces to 10.

Things get more interesting at tier four, which adds retainers (charging clients for services to be rendered later) and 100 OCR credits per month for scanning receipts. Tier five — the $700 option — unlocks unlimited OCR and access to the AI assistant. It's worth noting that the AI assistant is completely locked behind the highest tier, which feels like a missed opportunity. Letting users on lower tiers try it out, even in a limited capacity, would give people a reason to upgrade rather than never experiencing the feature at all.

Final Verdict: Is Billed Worth It?

Billed earns a 7.6 out of 10. It's a solid, well-rounded invoicing and time tracking platform that covers the fundamentals without any major gaps. The recurring invoice system is well implemented, custom fields add welcome flexibility, and the project-based billing workflow is genuinely useful for service businesses.

The rough edges are minor but worth mentioning: invoice pages load a bit slowly for clients, the items section is buried in settings rather than the main navigation, and that new-task creation bug in the time tracker needs fixing. The decision to gate the AI assistant entirely behind the most expensive tier also feels like a misstep.

That said, at $49 for a lifetime deal, you're getting a capable invoicing platform that handles clients, estimates, invoices, time tracking, and expenses in one place. If you're a freelancer or small agency looking to consolidate your billing tools, Billed is a straightforward, no-complaints kind of choice.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.