Subqueries - performance and use question

I need some basic advice on how to run a subquery, or if there's a
better way. Let me set up a situation, and get some advice on it. This
is my first post on this list, so I hope this kind of noob question is
ok.

Say I have a table of customers and table of accounts receivable
transactions, There is a one-to-many relationship between the two
(obviously a customer can have more than one purchase/transaction).

I want to run a query where I pull a set of customers based on some
parameter like, for sake of an example, where their status = new, and
also pull the most recent billing date from the accounts receivable
table.

Here's what I came up with:

SELECT customers.id, customers.firstname,
customers.lastname, customers.phone number,
(SELECT ar.billdate FROM ar
WHERE customers.customerid = ar.customerid
ORDER BY ar.billdate LIMIT 1)
AS lastarbilldate
FROM customers
WHERE customers.status = 'new';

As you can see, I'm using a subquery here to get the latest billing
date. My question is twofold. Is this subquery style the only way to
get one record in a one-to-many relationship, or is there a way to do it
with a join? Also, if this is fine, is there a way to do it that would
get the same results but be faster? It may not matter on a small
database, but if you've got millions of customers and transactions, a
subquery can get expensive.

I'm just looking for some basic direction. I hope my fake example makes
sense.

I'm running PostgreSQL 8.1, on a Windows 2003 server.

TIA

-Jeff
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