Tools for the freelancer – Your rates, your time & billing your way

Freelance writing – freelance anything, is a business and like any business, you have to know how to determine a fair and workable income that will allow you to continue freelancing – otherwise you’ll starve, your bills won’t be paid and it will be mighty difficult to keep that roof over the head too, right?  You also need to know how to manage your time – and know how much time you spend on your projects and of course there’s always Invoice and billing practices to be dealt with.

Today, there are a number of ways that freelancers can manage and track their business and do it directly from the Internet or from their desk/laptop without spending a large amount of time and energy from scratch.

So, if you are still trying to get your pricing matrix in order, still trying to organize and keep track of billable hours, want to know what your break-even point is or are still writing out Invoices by hand – then let me see if I can make it a little less work.  Although some of the following tools will no doubt need to be ‘tweaked’  to fit in with your specific requirements while others are pretty complete, almost all will provide you with a  jumping off point and if they aren’t ideal, they will at least give you a good foundation for your own custom development.

Those tools such as Harvest, offer additional incentives for signing up with them – so investigate the following, pick and choose what you think will work best for your situation and get on the track to managing your freelance business so that you can start to enjoy what your doing a little more without worrying about how you’re going to track it all.

• FreelanceSwitch.com offers a tool that you complete from their website and is adaptable for anyone who is into freelancing, not just writing.  This tool allows you to determine your Hourly and your Break-even rates.
• Harvest.com offers a sleek, online tool that allows you to track almost everything – from free to $90/month depending upon your requirements and number of users involved.  While you’re here – check out the Founders opportunity – Harvest.com gives away a years worth of subscription service to one new start up every month – it might as well be you!
• MS Excel/Word etc:  If you already have Excel and are just looking for a budget based template you may find several on Microsoft’s site that you can use to good measure.  Note: You may likely be required to go through the “Genuine” check for many of these although there are some that are free of this requirement.  As long as you have Office and it’s a genuine article – this is a good resource for those who like to do their own spreadsheets and other work.
• Although this site is geared more to the Freelance Designer (Web/SEO etc.) you may find a form or two here that you can revamp a bit for your own needs.  Note: A drawback is that you will need to have a copy of Adobe Illustrator or Adobe PDF – both of these programs can be downloaded for trial runs for a 30 – 60 day period – enough time to allow you to re-work what you need to.  Registration is required if you have never downloaded from Adobe before.
• AllFreelance.com offers up an article with diagrams regarding  Pricing and setting up your rates which might prove useful.

A Google search will undoubtedly uncover even more but these will help those of you who haven’t yet gotten these areas in line – to move you a little closer to satisfaction.

Akaiya