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.
Billable is an invoicing app with push notifications for your phone and desktop, delivered even when the app is closed. Each morning, at an hour you choose, a digest lists what’s overdue, what’s due this week and what’s still in draft. Between digests, separate alerts flag overdue invoices, expiring quotes, forgotten timers and sent reminders. On iPhone, add Billable to your Home Screen first.
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 — as soon as it tips past its due date, while it’s still easy to chase politely
- A client payment is coming due — so you know what should be landing soon
- A quote is about to expire — a sent quote nearing 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 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 goes quiet.
Which devices get push notifications?
Notifications work on Android, Windows, macOS and Linux, 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.
Frequently asked questions
Why am I not getting Billable notifications on my iPhone?
Most likely because Billable is open in a Safari tab rather than installed. Apple only delivers web push notifications to an app added to the Home Screen, so add Billable there (Share, then Add to Home Screen), open it from that icon, and turn notifications on in Account → Notifications. The same applies on iPad.
Do push notifications work when Billable is closed?
Yes. Once you’ve turned notifications on for a device and allowed them when the browser asked, the digest and alerts arrive on your phone or desktop even when Billable isn’t open. That’s the point: you hear about an overdue invoice or a forgotten timer without having to remember to open the app and look.
What’s the difference between push notifications and payment reminders?
Push notifications go to you; payment reminders go to your client. Reminders are emails Billable sends a client about an overdue invoice, automatically each week or when you click send. Notifications tell you what needs attention, including when a reminder has just gone out, so you always know what your client has received. For more on the chasing side, see why overdue reminders should be automatic.
How do I turn off notifications on one device but keep them on another?
Open Account → Notifications on the device you want to silence and switch it off. Because notifications belong to the device rather than your account, every other device keeps its own settings, digest hour and alerts. You can also see the list of devices you’ve enabled there, which makes it easy to tidy up an old laptop.
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.