You may be a designer or a developer par excellence, but that doesn’t guarantee success as a freelancer. It’s because freelancing demands much more from you than merely being good at your job.
You need to pay attention to various administrative issues. Besides, there’s the struggle of finding new assignments. Fortunately, some tools help freelancers cope with the various aspects of working on their own. These tools allow us to deal with all the administrative and sales activities with a good deal of efficiency so you can focus on work.
Let’s get into the details of a few tools that help freelancers with their work. We start with the most intimidating part of freelancing: managing finances.
Financial tools
If you’re looking to start a career as a freelancer, what worries you the most is managing your finances. You could find yourself in a mess of unexpected tax bills and unpaid invoices. Luckily, there are some very handy finance tools to help freelancers. With one of these tools, you’ll do just fine without an accountant. Even if you do need one, you won’t need to pay him through the nose.
You are in control of your finances as you can check your profits, spot any upcoming problems in cash flow, and know how much to spend on your taxes. Just for a few dollars, not only can you invoice your clients, but you may also receive payments from them, and of course, chase late payers.
Proposal software
The next important aspect of freelancing is designing a killer proposal. While it’s important to respond to invitations to tenders, what bothers you is the long time it takes. Not only do you need to put great attention into preparing the documents, in many instances, you are also expected to make them look visually attractive. Of course, you can always create a stunning proposal even with no software but using applications does have its advantages.
The applications come with design templates that you can customize, giving you a snazzy proposal.
Project collaboration tools
To be a successful freelancer, you’ve got to control your projects. Not only do you remain profitable, maintaining clear communication with your clients reassures them giving them the confidence that you can deliver. There’s no shortage of collaboration tools that can manage your projects, with Basecamp being the most well-known among them. You can also choose Trello as an alternative. With this tool, you can create custom Trello reports and dashboards to keep your projects on track and make your customers happy. You can take advantage of prebuilt reports to quickly get started. You can create personalized, real time Trello dashboards for your team and for your clients. And also you can generate charts, maps, calendars, and more.
You’ll have to be careful about a certain issue, though. A certain client may have his way of working. If you impose a tool on a client that they are not comfortable using, it’s likely to damage the relationship by creating confusion. Therefore, you must confirm with your client if he’s comfortable using your tool before getting started.
Document repository
As a freelancer, there are a lot of documents you need to handle, right from tax certificates to meeting notes. You often end up with your documents scattered all around: old diaries, your emails, or files. Ideally, these documents should be stored in a central place capable of being located instantly. You’re in luck! Document management software is here to help you with just that.
Tools like Bear or Notion are just right when you’re looking to organize digital content. However, there are shortcomings in both when it comes to handling paper documents. Evernote is suitable for managing documents on paper.
Privacy tools
As a freelancer, you will talk to many people. Additionally, you will constantly exchange documents and information. Thus, you should reassure that all these communications with your clients happen securely. How can you do this? The easiest solution is to use a VPN every time you start working. A Virtual Private Network protects your internet traffic and the information exchanged by encrypting it. Thus, bystanders or snoopers won’t be able to spy on your activities.
Conclusion
As a freelancer, you need to be mindful of every penny. The tools mentioned here might appear fancy stuff you can do without, but they help you save a lot of time. You could use this time to find new projects creating more income. Being organized also helps you be efficient and help earn the trust of your clients. These tools are just what you need to make your mark as a freelancer.
