Because most freelancers love what they do, it can often seem acceptable to work 80+ hours in a single week. While sometimes you really do need to kick out some work, overall it’s not a positive thing to be that unbalanced. In the past months, we have added a few company rules.

I wanted to jot down some things I practice to keep personal life in balance with work. I hope they help you too:

1. No one is productive for +80 hours a week

   With very few exceptions, I’ve never seen anyone who can work more than 80 hours. Besides something isn’t right if you spend that much time working. If you can’t make a living working less than 80 hours a week, you need to change careers.

2. Around 5pm you must be looking for a place to pause work.

   Many of us have small kids and they go to bed early. If you must finish a task do it once they’re in bed. During evening hours, family time is #1, work is far down the list of priorities. We usually do three to five hours of more work after the kids go to sleep
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This post is a guest post from Allan Branch, a one time freelancer who created LessAccounting for freelancers who need to keep track of money or send invoices.

What if someone could sue your company and then, since your company has no money, take your house or win a judgment that takes you fifteen years to pay? The Corporate Veil provides protection against this happening to you.

What is it?

The Corporate Veil is the legal shield that protects an individual from being personally liable for the actions of his/her company. This only applies to owners, partners, board members, not employees or share holders. In this country a person, or a company may sue any other person or company for anything, at any time. But there is only one reason to sue, and that is to be awarded money. So if a person or company doesn’t have any money, then there isn’t really anything to sue for. Continue Reading

This post is a guest post from Allan Branch, a web designer/entrepreneur who started as a freelancer. After just 4 years Allan’s company has grown to 10 full-time employees and is responsible for the indispensable LessAccounting as well has several other apps still in beta.

Over the past years, my business has grown from a freelancer fresh out of college to a business with employees, constant expenses and payroll. When you’re in the early stages of freelancing accounting is simple. You always know what you have in the bank, you have few expenses and few accounts receivable. As you become more established your accounting needs grow. Things can be easier later if you setup a simple accounting protocol early before these problems arise and take over your life.

Here are some basic accounting steps for a freelancer:

Step 1 – You need a system to bill people.
There are tons of invoicing tools online, (LessAccounting, BlinkSale, FreshBooks). Most have free accounts for you to try out, and it’s worth utilizing these great resources. Web based systems are best, I lost all my 2002 data due to a HD crash and no, I didn’t have backups. It cost $3500 to recover my accounting data for that year. Continue Reading