Freelancing Woes:

Accounting without an accountant

So, for the past few years as a freelancer the one part work that i've hated is paperwork, specifically accounting. The best part about working for someone else is that they chase the money for you, so you don't have to ask for your pay - it just appears in your bank account.

Obviously anyone who has ever freelanced already knows this. What we may or may not know is that there are some great tools online to help us to keep track of what we do.

1) Timesheeting

One of the first jobs I worked in had a very open, transparent method of billing clients. Each of the workers in the office kept a running (by the minute) timesheet of what they were doing, associated to client - at the end of the month, our boss would compile invoices for the clients based entirely on that timesheet data. This model is probably dubious if you want to keep your profit margins secret from your employees... but there is a valuable lesson for the freelancer here. Everything you do should be timesheeted, it doesn't matter if you are billing flat rate, hourly, weekly , whatever... the fact is having a running timesheet of the work you do for clients is a brilliant way to measure your own productivity (and analyse whether your clients are worth having - an issue that I am trying to deal with at the moment).

So, what's the best solution for keeping track of timesheeting? I use an online web app called Harvest (www.harvestapp.com). It has a few killer features that made me choose it (and even open my wallet for it).

• Multi-client, multi-project management: I can add clients, and then projects underneath. Some of the work I do is for clients who run a variety of web sites, some direct to clients and some sub contracted to other web agencies - so be able to associate different jobs (at different rates) to different customers is golden.
• Multi user support: During my trial of Harvest i added a second "freelance" user to my account, to get my friend Omar to test out how the multi user features worked. At the end of the trial I discovered that the harvest guys had left a bug in their software that let me KEEP my second account when i signed up, even though the account i paid for was supposed to be restricted to one user. (As an aside: honesty is always the best policy. As soon as i discovered this bug i contacted the guys at harvest and let them know... in return for the information, they let me keep my freelancer user account for nothing).
• Works on my Iphone: This may sound dumb but let me explain. I have one client who is having an on-going love affair with meetings. I find them pointless and timewasting.. SO: i use my iphone to fire up my harvest timesheet when i arrive at their office and track the time i waste in their meetings. For now i'm not billing it on, but at least i can present an argument if it ever becomes an issue.
• In built Invoicing: See below, this is a biggy..

2) Invoicing

Harvest recently added the ability to create and track invoices from within their system. Which means in short that at the end of the month(or whatever billing cycle you use), you can generate a PDF invoice for your client and automatically send it them via email. The system is robust and flexible enough to suit my needs (and so any freelancer that i can think of) - saves me firing up a document, writing out my bill items, adding up the totals and exporting a PDF for every client. A job that USED to take me the better part of a day at the end of every month now takes me abut 1 hour.

Harvest also lets you log the acceptance of invoices and track outstanding payments - which is golden when you have to send lots of little invoices to lots of little clients!

So, coupled with Fluid on my mac, I now have a desktop (albiet web reliant) application that handles all my timesheeting and invoicing - leaving me free to be creative.