Anyone still creating invoices manually instead of paying monthly fees?

I spent way too much time this week looking for an old client payment record across messy folders.

Since my freelance work is pretty sparse paying $20/month for a subscription based accounting app feels like overkill. But sticking to basic spreadsheet templates is clearly getting disorganized as time goes on.

There has to be a middle ground between manual sheets and heavy SaaS apps.

How do you handle client billing when your workload is light and doesn't warrant a full software package?