Starting out on your freelancing career can be a daunting task for just about anyone. From registering your business name to setting up your accounts, there can be a lot of stress when making those first important decisions.

One question the FreelanceSwitch forum gets frequently asked is: what should you use to invoice your clients? So we thought we would take a look at one straightforward invoicing service called – Blinksale.
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You work hard on your assignment, turn it in, and do the required (ugh) revisions. You happily send in your invoice — and wait…and wait…and wait.

Your check is late! You have a mortgage to pay and you were relying on that check. Now what?

Late checks are a fact of life for freelancers. Most of the time, the clients aren’t being malicious — they just do things slowly. But that doesn’t help you when you have bills to pay. Here are some ways to get that check moving towards your mailbox. Continue Reading

If there’s one thing I’m bad at in this whole freelancing business it’s bookkeeping. I mean, I’m a writer — and frankly, one of the things that draws me to writing is that it’s not bookkeeping. If you’re a writer, a designer, or even a coder, chances are you were drawn by the possibility of putting words, images, and code together in creative ways, not by the prospect of meticulously recording financial transactions.

The bookkeeping and accounting a freelancer has to do boils down to three things:

1. Recording invoices and payments,
2. Recording expenses, and
3. Computing and paying your taxes.

For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been using LessAccounting to handle the first two, and sort of “winging it” to handle the third. I like LessAccounting, and with a little creative data entry (e.g. holding off on entering payments in months when I get several payments and entering them during slower months; the free account limits the number of payments you can enter in any given month) I’ve managed to do pretty well for myself with a free account. But that’s changing – I’m developing more clients and more steady invoicing and payments to record, and at the same time my income is growing to the point where taxes are becoming a nightmare.

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As a freelancer, the most important part of your day can be spent sending out invoices. While you might run across a client or two who is happy to send you payment as soon as he receives a finished product, most will wait for your invoice: no invoice, no money. That means invoicing is just something you do. It’s necessary — but it’s also a system you can improve on. Taking a look at some best practices for invoicing can help you tighten up your own system. You can get the money you’re owed without taking too much time away from your income-producing work. Continue Reading

Photo by laffy4k.

We’ve reached the end of our series on New Year’s Planning. The previous three articles covered:

1. Next year’s tax bill
2. Next year’s budget
3. Next year’s client acquisition plan

Now we’re going to talk about you. Specifically, about making you into a smarter business person. Here, my rule of thumb is that it’s not enough to be in business. You must also be a student of business.

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Photo by audreyjim529.

As the new year is just around the corner, some of you might resolve to take a step forward into becoming a freelancer. According to what’s been written in the comments at FreelanceSwitch, there are those of you thinking about this.

With the way the economy has been, it wouldn’t be too surprising if the freelancer ranks grow in the next few months. Here are a few tips to get you started.

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Photo by Geekgirly.

We all know how many responsibilities a freelancer has and how many different hats we have to wear (client work, invoicing and finances, marketing, customer service, etc.). It can be easy to forget that we all have strengths and weaknesses because we spend so much time trying to be good at everything.

In order to do our best work and to maximize efficiency and productivity, we need to recognize what we do well (and what we don’t) and avoid trying to be all things to all people.

From what I see, our weaknesses can be broken down into two categories: 1) specific types of projects, and 2) the various tasks of freelancing. On this first point, most of us have a particular type of service that we specialize in. A designer/developer may be best at designing high-end flash-based sites, and may not be so skilled at designing an attractive website with a minimalist approach, or vice versa. Freelance writers will typically have certain topics or types of writing that they are more experienced with, and so on.

On the second point, we all have certain aspects of freelancing that we excel at, and others that are more of a struggle. For example, you may have a hard time with keeping your invoices and finances organized, but you may excel at dealing directly with clients.

Regardless of what our strengths and weaknesses are, we need to recognize them and realize when we’re not able to do an effective job on a particular project or a specific aspect of freelancing. Continue Reading

When I came up with the headline for this article, I figured that many freelancers are so busy that they probably don’t have any time to organize their tax information before they hand it over to their accountants. We’re all so focused on our businesses—who has time to do nice for their accountant? You do, actually. And the payoffs could be big!

It really doesn’t take much to get things together to make things easier for your accountant, and perhaps save time. If you’re like me and you toss pay stubs and receipts into one large envelope during the year, you may want to break things up so your accountant can easily work through your taxes. This saves your accountant time, and it saves you money. Also, I don’t use anything fancy for invoicing (something I need to change, I suppose) but even organizing your Quicken files can be a huge help for the accountant, save you money, and offer more time for you to ask questions and help your business.

You’ll find that little things will make tax time much more manageable for you and your accountant. Here are some easy things you can do to get organized. Continue Reading

I love online apps and with the exception of my trusty Adobe programs, have taken to using virtually everything online from email to spreadsheets to money management. One area where online apps can be really beneficial to freelancers is for invoicing. In fact, online invoicing is so useful that there are a *ton* of options to choose from.

Here are 7 invoicing apps you might want to look into:

1. LessAccounting

   
   First up on the list is LessAccounting, partly because it’s a neat program and partly because they Allan Branch from LessEverything writes articles for FSw! LessAccounting does invoicing (sending and tracking) and it also helps you track your banking data by interfacing with Wesabe – the rather neat money-management app.

   COST: $0 – $20 p/month (Details)

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