Most of the money a solo business loses isn’t lost to bad clients. It’s lost to the invoice that went overdue three weeks ago and nobody noticed, the quote that quietly expired, the draft that never got sent, the timer that ran all afternoon after the work had stopped.
None of that is hard to fix. It’s just hard to remember — because remembering means opening the app, and you only open the app when you already have a reason to.
So Billable now comes to you. Push notifications land on your phone or desktop even when Billable is closed, and they’re built around exactly the things that go wrong when you’re not looking.
A short digest each morning
Pick an hour — 9am, 10am, whenever you actually start work — and Billable sends you one notification a day covering:
- What’s gone overdue, and by how much
- What’s due over the next week, so nothing sneaks up
- What’s still sitting in draft, because unsent invoices don’t get paid
The hour is your local time, not a server’s. Move countries, or just let the clocks change, and the digest keeps arriving when you expect it. If you run more than one business in Billable, one device covers all of them, with each line labelled so you know which business it belongs to.
On Mondays there’s also a short summary of the week just gone: hours tracked, amount invoiced, amount paid. Enough to know how the week went without opening anything.
One detail we were deliberate about: amounts are shown in the currency they were billed in. If you’re owed $1,200 and €800, that’s what you’ll see — not a single converted figure that looks tidier and isn’t quite true.
Nudges as things happen
Between digests, Billable tells you when something actually needs you:
- An invoice goes overdue — the morning after it passes its due date
- A payment you owe is coming due — contractor and person payments, within the next week
- A quote is about to expire — a sent quote within three days of its “valid until” date, while there’s still time to follow up
- A timer is still running — because you started one this morning and it’s been going for eight hours
- A reminder went out — whenever Billable automatically chases a client on your behalf
Each of these is its own switch. Keep the overdue alerts and turn off the rest, or the other way round — it’s your lock screen.
Tap any notification and Billable opens straight to the thing it’s about: the invoice, the quote, the running timer. No hunting for it once you’re in.
Per device, not per account
Notifications belong to the device, not your account. That’s a small design decision with a genuinely useful consequence: your phone can buzz at 9am while your work laptop stays completely silent, and a tablet you only pick up on weekends can be switched off entirely without affecting anything else.
You’ll find the whole thing in Account → Notifications: turn on the device you’re currently using, choose your digest hour, flip the individual alert types, and see the list of devices you’ve already enabled. Turn one off and it stops immediately.
Which devices this works on
Notifications work on Android, Windows, macOS and Linux — in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari or Samsung Internet — straight from the browser. You don’t have to install Billable as an app first; on Android, installing it to your home screen is the nicer experience, but the notifications work either way.
iPhone and iPad are the one exception. Apple only delivers web notifications to an app that’s been added to the Home Screen — in a normal Safari tab the capability simply isn’t there. So on iOS the order is: add Billable to your Home Screen (Share → Add to Home Screen), open it from that icon, then turn notifications on from Account → Notifications. Billable detects this and explains the extra step rather than showing you a switch that couldn’t do anything.
Turning it on
If you’re already using Billable:
- Open Account → Notifications.
- Choose Turn on for this device and allow notifications when your browser asks.
- Set your digest hour and pick which alerts you want.
That’s it. Tomorrow morning you’ll get a two-line summary of everything that needs your attention, and for the rest of the day Billable will only interrupt you when something genuinely changed.
The goal was never to add another app pinging at you. It’s that the invoice you forgot about should be something you find out on a Tuesday morning — not three months later, when it’s much harder to ask for.