Invoicing for film crews who bill day rates

Say you mixed sound on a three-day commercial: you and a boom op, your package, walkies for the production, and the consumables. That invoice looks like this:

Labor and Equipment are sections, not a flat list. Production companies budget labor and equipment separately, so your invoice should split them the same way. Sections group your lines under a heading and print a subtotal for each, with the combined total at the bottom. The accountant on the other side can approve it without emailing you a question.

Day rates get a real Days column. Line items can switch to quantity times days times rate, so "Production sound mixer, 3 days at $750" is one line that does its own math, and "10 walkies at $6 a day for 3 days" is another. The column is renamable per business: Days, Weeks, Sessions, whatever your corner of the industry calls it. Each line can also carry its service date, so the invoice reads like the shoot actually went.

Your rates are saved once, reused every job. Star a line item and it lands in your item catalog, grouped by section. The next job is: new invoice, pick "Production sound mixer" and "Sound package" from the list, set the days, done. A three-day shoot becomes a two-minute invoice.

And when a production asks for a quote first, the same editor writes estimates with a printable client sign-off, and converts an accepted quote into the invoice. Deposits and balance invoices work from there too.

For years the answer to crew invoicing on a Mac was PAID, and it earned that: it was built for this industry. Its developer retired, updates stopped, and everyone who relied on it learned the hard lesson of app longevity: when a tool dies, your invoicing history is stranded on whatever machine still runs it.

More than one of our customers came from PAID, and the things they asked for are now in the app: the labor and equipment split, saved day rates and gear fees, per-line dates, documents that call themselves what your client expects. If PAID did something you still miss, tell us, that's literally how this app gets built.

And the lesson itself is designed in, not just learned from. Your data lives in a local file on your Mac, with one-click backup, never in an account on someone's server. The license is a one-time purchase, and the app runs without a connection. If this app's developer disappeared tomorrow, the copy on your Mac would keep making invoices. Why it's built that way.

This page isn't a persona exercise. The Labor and Equipment sections were requested by a camera operator who came from PAID. The renamable Days column came from a production sound mixer who rents out gear. Both shipped within days of the email that asked for them, and the public changelog shows which release each request became.

"It's exactly what I've been looking for."

• It works where you work. InvoiceOffline runs fully offline. Soundstage, basecamp, a ranch two hours past the last cell tower: you can write and export the invoice right after wrap, and email it whenever you're back in coverage.
• It's an invoicing app, not an accounting suite. No bank feeds, no chart of accounts, no per-client portal logins. It writes professional invoices, tracks who paid, and chases who didn't.
• Loan-out friendly. If you invoice through a corporation and also personally, each business keeps its own branding, numbering, and documents in the same app.
• You buy it like gear, not like a service. Free for up to 5 new invoices a month, every feature included. The Pro license is $59 once (founder price, $79 regular): unlimited invoices, recurring billing, multiple businesses. Perpetual for version 1, all 1.x updates included, no activation limit on your Macs.