This MacNews Category Review looks at account management products for the Mac. Products covered include Account Management, Billings Pro, Fanurio, FreshBooks, Minco, Slife and Time Tagger.

Account Manager

Account Manager (http://www.fmnexus.com/accountmanager) allows administrators of FileMaker databases to centrally manage multiple servers, databases, users and privileges. Itequires FileMaker 8 or later. It simplifies administration by facilitating centralized account management of multiple databases without requiring direct modification of each disparate database. End-users can access multiple databases and remote servers with a single log-in.

Billings Pro

Billings Pro (http://www.marketcircle.com/billingspro) is a billing and invoicing solution for Mac OS X and the iPhone. It's a multi-user time tracking and invoicing application for for multi-user businesses, with a web interface for workers to track time. Billings Pro uses Marketcircle's Apple Design Award Winning desktop interface from Billings 3, as well as an iPhone application based heavily off of their Billings Touch app. The synchronization technology is derived from Marketcircle's Daylite software.

Fanurio

With Fanurio (http://www.fanuriotimetracking.com) you can organize your work, track time and create invoices. It's designed to help freelancers keep track of their time and work, and then invoice it to their customers. Every time you sign a contract, just add a new client to the application and create a project. During the project, you can add project items and expenses to account for your work. You can decide any time if an item is billable or not, and if it should be billed using an hourly rate or a flat rate. Billable items can later be added to an invoice.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks (http://www.freshbooks.com) is an online invoicing and time tracking service designed for small businesses, teams, and independent professionals. The time tracking service improves workflow and reporting by allowing users to track and enter time in hourly, daily and weekly formats. It also includes a pop-up timer to record on-the-spot activities. Timesheets can be shared to improve client relationships and reduce the time spent communicating and justifying project progress. Invoices are generated with one click from Timesheet entries, which speeds collection and takes the pain out of billing clients, he adds.

Minco

Minco (http://www.celmaro.com/minco/) is a time tracking solution for Mac OS X 10.6 ("Snow Leopard"). It integrates with iCal and allows to write time logs in self specified formats to the file system. Minco can also visualize the daily spend time in iCal and hereby allows sharing with others. The software runs in the system menu to give access via shortcuts. The user interface is consequently optimized and focused on tracking, adding, and editing tasks. Minco shows the elapsed time or the acquired revenue in a display that can focus on a task, day, week, month or year.

Slife

Slife (http://www.sflielabs.com) is an automatic time and activity management solution for Mac OS X. Slife's activity tracking technology observes user's computers activities completely automatically and displays them in a set of interactive visualizations. Designed for individuals who need to keep track of time, such as designers and consultants, Slife frees users from having to manually fill out time sheets.

Time Tagger

Time Tagger (http://www.matterform.com) is a time-tracking program for the Mac. Rather than setting up projects and clients and timers, users simply click tags on and off in the Time Tagger window to track their time. The main Time Tagger window features a large field of text snippets, or tags, which users can click on and off to describe the work they are doing at any moment. Custom tags can be created on the same window. A reporting tool lets you generate time sheets for any set of tags.