Well it’s been another busy few months. We’ve got a lot of news to share with the world, but right now not quite enough time to share it all. As a company we’re expecting some serious growth. There’s a lot of very exciting stuff happening.

To make things easier as we move forward, we’ve been making some changes – simplifying things. September heralds a new beginning in many ways. One of the changes we’ve made is switching our accounting from Xero over to FreeAgent. Why?

Before I say anything else I just want to say Xero is a great accounting package. The team there can clearly see what’s needed and are working very hard to provide it. The amount of funding they’ve received is a testament to their commitment and has no doubt impacted hugely on the quality of the product and its overall feature set.

But for us, it’s just too much. As a small business with very simple needs, there are some features we don’t need and never use. And then there are some things that Xero just doesn’t do and probably never will. Things like time tracking.

A business of any size ought to keep track of employee time. For a small business that charges by the hour, it’s crucial for calculating profitability, estimating deadlines and projecting costs. Even on a fixed-price jobs, time-tracking is necessary.

Personally, I believe that time-tracking should be linked with accounting. While we use Basecamp for project management, the time-tracking features of FreeAgent are in my view far superior. Being able to turn Timeslips into Invoices is a massive win.

FreeAgent’s UI is also a mega bonus. Xero was clearly made for accountants. FreeAgent on the other hand has been designed with real people in mind. The helpful hints and clear buttons and menus make it easy to navigate and do what you need to do.

The layout of the menu is especially interesting:

Notice how, going from left to right, you deal with each aspect of money management as it happens: create/update Contacts (customers and suppliers) first, then assign Estimates, Project, Time, and Invoices to clients (money in). After that is money out – Bills, Expenses and Taxes. Then all of your financial reports for that retrospective look over your accounts. It’s a flow – and it’s in a logical order.

It really is a joy to use. It also plays nicely with other apps such as Basecamp. Add to this other key features such as adding attachments to bank reconciliations (i.e. PDF invoices), Estimates, automated VAT return in the UK and automated invoice emails.

The fact that they’re based in the UK too means they understand what it’s like to run a business here. Xero is based in New Zealand and other services tend to be based in the States (e.g. FreshBooks).

I initially tried FreeAgent a while back, but because we were happy enough with Xero at the time, I kept quiet. The trial account expired and I needed to pay before I could use it again. As I hadn’t really used the account, I just asked the guys nicely if they extend my free trial. Amazingly they did! So customer service is well up there too.

FreeAgent suits us very well as a company. It’s focussed around time-tracking and project-level work, which is our bread and butter. The fact that it’s primarily a web app is important to us. We could use desktop packages such as Billings, but we all feel they impose limits on when and where we can do our accounts.

All round we’re thrilled with FreeAgent. It’s making all of our lives a hell of a lot easier. As we move forward as a company, we believe that services like this are key to our growth. There are some things that need a little work, but the team is showing real interest in their community by working on features that their users are requesting. So FreeAgent, keep up the fantastic work!

I keep meaning to do a list of cool things I have found recently. I always said when I bought my Mac that I would document my experience… I have managed to blog about certain things, but not always the ones I wanted to.

So this post is going to be more about Mac apps and tools that I have found over the last year or so that have been extremely useful since I switched to being a Mac.

Plus, with the advent of the latest MacHeist nanoBundle and cracking sites like the AppStorm blogs, I thought it would be a good time to throw my two-pence-worth in.

So here’s my list of killer tools (in no particular order):

• Coda – the best coding app I’ve used in a long time
• Dropbox – this is secretly my favourite. don’t know how I survived without dropbox before now
• Notify – forget Google Notifier, get this it’s brilliant!
• Tweetie for Mac – the best Twitter client for your Mac
• Teleport – an amazing utility to control one Mac from another over a network
• Skitch – a nice little screen capture app
• Mac The Ripper – the easiest DVD ripper I’ve ever used – try RipIt if you also want to do an all-in-one conversion to a video file
• Onyx – a must-have maintenance and advanced admin tool
• Adium – my favourite IM app… connects to all the networks I use (except Skype)
• 1Password – unbeatable password manager

There are plenty of apps I haven’t tried out yet and some apps I would still like to see built (maybe I’ll learn Cocoa and start building some of my own…)

Here’s a somewhat haphazard review of some other cool Mac apps – I think Paul had too much coffee

Please share your favourite Mac apps in the comments, I need more!!!