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The world would be a better place if...

A 2009 product idea connecting mite time tracking with Ballpark invoicing.

Published
Reading time
2 min read

… Ballpark would marry mite. These two fabulous web apps would get along perfectly!

I don’t want to ask too much, and I know the feature I’m requesting may fall out of the 80 % category of what the majority wants. But please, dear Ballpark team, consider it. Maybe in a stand up meeting right now!

I think this is actually a business opportunity on both sides.
There would be more potentially interested clients. (Don’t ask me numbers, I don’t run these apps – ask @mite or @metalab.)

For more information about each app, here are the links to their tours:

→ ”Fast input, powerful output: mite lets you track your time in a structured way. Advanced reporting helps you and your team to stay on top of your daily business.”

→ ”Using Ballpark is going to be your daily bottom of the ninth, full count, walk-off home run moment of invoice zen.”

Managing both without pain

It is a lot of work to write invoices or estimates. I do this by hand for about a year now. But the more I think about the process, the more I get the feeling it can be done with less effort.
At the end of each month, I sit down and get this quirky process started:

1. Download the reports for every project of the last month from mite as a PDF.
2. Get the total and write it in the blank with Pages
3. Get the full address of the client and fill it in the blank
4. Save the edited blank as the new invoice
5. Launch Adobe Acrobat
6. Combine those PDFs into one.
7. Send the combined PDF per E-Mail to the client with a few nice words.

This scenario could be cut down:

1. Create a new invoice for the client on my ballpark account.
2. Select the client’s project with all time entries from last month.
3. Add a few nice words and send the invoice to the client via ballpark.

The design outline

References for development