Arari
Know your real hourly rate.
What you invoice and what you keep are two different numbers.
The hours you spent, the stock images, the subcontractor — all of it comes out of the first one.
Arari shows the gross profit and the real hourly rate of each project. Accounting software gives you profit for a period; it does not tell you what a particular job earned, or what that works out to per hour. Arari does only that part.
What it does
- Gross profit dashboard. Revenue − costs = gross profit, divided by the hours you tracked. Projects in the red are surfaced
- Time tracking. The start time is stored, so the count stays right even if the app is suspended. You can correct entries by hand afterwards
- Expenses, split between costs tied to a project and general costs that span several
- Estimates, delivery notes and invoices as PDFs, built from the project. Tax is broken down per rate, with withholding tax and the amount due after it
- A completeness check for the items a Japanese qualified invoice needs — free, never behind the paywall
- Multiple currencies. Each project can have its own; exchange rates you enter convert them into your base currency
- Documents in your client's language, set per client and independent of the app's own language
- Payment tracking with expected dates and an unpaid list
- Search across everything — clients, projects, documents (down to line item descriptions) and expenses
- Backup and restore. Export a file, keep it, and bring it back on a new device
- iCloud sync through your own account, so iPhone, iPad and Mac stay in step
You enter the exchange rates
Arari never connects to the internet, so it does not fetch rates either — it uses the ones you type. Each rate is stored with the project and document that used it. Accounting practice records a transaction at the rate on the day it happened, so this matches how the books work anyway.
Projects without a rate are excluded from the total and counted on the dashboard. They are never quietly added as zero.
It runs on the Mac too
iPhone, iPad and Mac. The Mac version is a native app rather than an iPad app on a Mac: a three-pane sidebar/list/detail layout with ⌘N, ⌘F and ⌘Z. One purchase covers all three.
Pricing
| Feature | Free | Pro (yearly) |
|---|---|---|
| Clients | 5 | Unlimited |
| Projects | 10 | Unlimited |
| Estimates and invoices | 20 in total | Unlimited |
| Delivery notes | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time tracking, expenses, payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Qualified-invoice completeness check | ✓ | ✓ |
| Withholding tax | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gross profit history | This month | All time, with comparisons |
| Alerts for projects in the red | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multiple currencies | ✗ | ✓ |
| Documents in your client's language | ✗ | ✓ |
| Custom fields | ✗ | ✓ |
| iCloud sync | ✗ | ✓ |
| CSV import and export | ✗ | ✓ |
| Backup export | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restore from a backup | ✗ | ✓ |
| Biometric lock | ✓ | ✓ |
Pro is an auto-renewing yearly subscription. New subscribers get a 7-day free trial; cancel during it and you are not charged. Cancel any time in your Apple Account settings. There is no monthly plan, and Family Sharing is not supported.
Your data stays if the subscription ends. You can still view everything and export PDFs and CSV files; only creating and editing stop. Your client list and billing history are never held hostage. Exporting a backup is free, so you can always take your data with you.
About tax
Arari calculates and prints the figures and fields you enter. It is not tax or legal advice. Japanese consumption tax is rounded once per tax rate per document, as the rules require, and you can choose rounding down, up or to nearest. Check the requirements that apply to you with a qualified professional.
What it does not do
- Tax filing or double-entry bookkeeping (export CSV or PDF into your accounting software instead)
- Shared editing or permissions for teams — it assumes one person
- Fetching exchange rates automatically, because it does not use the network