I use…a bit of everything. Tyme2 is my billable hours tracker. It’s flexible: Groups (which I use for different types of work: press, social, investigation, etc); Clients/Projects, Tasks/Subtasks; and you can archive any of those individually. It also allows you to set time or currency-based budgets and tracks your progress.
I then manually move that information over to Xero, which I use for invoicing and balancing my books (lots of pass-through expenses to clients).
I have also been using OfficeTime for years. My invoicing is not complicated enough to justify a monthly subscription model, so I appreciate the pay once and be done benefit of OfficeTime. My customized invoice is beautiful and I can easily email it to my clients. They have an iOS app that syncs well with the Mac version if I’m on site at a client’s office and away from my Mac. It can also handle expense items with ease. If you don’t need all the bells and whistles of a subscription/cloud invoicing system, it is definitely worth checking out!
I use Omnifocus to manage all my projects. I track all my time in 15 minute intervals using the standard Calendar app. Once a week I add up the hours for each project that is to be billed and add the amount to the note field for that project in Omnifocus. I bill out once a month, most actually get a hand written invoice on 2 part forms (really old school, I know) and I give them a copy and I keep one in a waiting for folder in my desk. I pair them up with checks rcvd once a month.
I also only usually have one or 2 billable projects going on at a time. If I had a larger volume I’d try to automate it a lot more.
Pleased to hear from another user!
A little late to the party here but tracking projects and invoices for me both go in my task manager – once the invoice is issued, it goes in there with an @waiting tag plus and @finance tag, and I’ve set up a filter to catch the two of those together when I want to review which payments are outstanding. Maybe simplistic, not very automated and more work than necessary but I like being in control…
I use the pancake app. https://www.pancakeapp.com/why. I used to use Billings pro unit they went to the subscription model. Pancake was bought once several years ago. It has been great.
I also use Tyme2 to track billable hours for my recruitment business. It replaced a messy numbers sheet and has paid for itself many times over. Given my relatively low volume, I export data from Tyme2 and manually create invoices using Pages templates. Basic income and expenses accounting is done in Numbers.