Dean, the blogger for Britain's Mobile Computing News, recently published a good piece on billing software, kicking off with the unarguable observation that "every company on the planet needs to have ways of accounting for the money that comes in and out of the business."

So what are these ways? Friends, let Dean count the ways:

Harvest. "It's a fantastic application," Dean thinks, letting you know up front where he's coming from. This web app "allows you to do project management and time tracking for projects you're working on, which you then can bill directly out of Harvest." And here's the nice part: It's free with limited use, at $12 per month for single users and from $90 per month for businesses. At that price, Dean notes, "it doesn't have full-fledged accounting built into it," but for us freelancers that's a bonus.

Sage Instant Accounts v16. "Heaped in praise and for good reason - it just works," Dean says. Indeed - it's aimed at SMBs, and has great billing technology coupled with built-in comprehensive automated accounting. The video tutorials with it are "surprisingly revealing about intelligent accounting practices," according to Dean. It's a bit pricey at about $150, but that's a one-time fee and hey, if you're unsure about accounting it sounds like the tutorials could be worth the money alone.

Intuit (News - Alert) Quickbooks. Yes, here's one you've heard of. It's a redwood in this forest, and okay, maybe they haven't been as innovative as others, and yes, it "suffers from feature creep," as Dean says, but maybe there's a reason it doesn't have to reinvent itself every year - it got it pretty close to being right. Plus in 2009 Intuit acquired personal finance web app Mint, which has to result in innovation in the basic product sooner or later.