Freelancers, what tool to track your income?

Hi :wave: !

I am building a new tool for freelance designers to plan and track your income. If you are a Freelance Designer like me, I would really appreciate your input.

What tool are you using to plan and track your income? And are you satisfied?

Thanks! :pray:
Sylvain

I have it set up so everything with math goes in Excel: invoices, taxes, travel costs, reimbursements, timecards, cashflow, retirement, equipment replacement schedules.

I had a bad experience early on in freelancing. I bought a timecard app and used it for 3 years, then had to update my system software. The app had been discontinued and no update was available for the new system, so I lost 3 years of records. That’s when I started using Excel. I figured that program will be around forever and I won’t have to deal with that kind of program again. It’s adequate and I’m satisfied, but if there was something better I’d take a look at it. But the first question I’d ask is how long am I going to be able to use this app, and what happens if the creator abandons it?

I removed your other post to prevent confusion. :slight_smile:

I’m just using google sheets. It’s online so I can update it any time. I record everything manually and use it as a tracker for payments.

I use Fanurio and my wife, who is an equal shareholder, does all the accounts side of things in excel, so we always know exactly where we are. She is a spreadsheet queen. I glaze over as soon as I even see the word excel – unless it has the word Lotus preceding it!

I had the same experience as mojo and it took me some time to find something that would import the data from the defunct software and to trust I could trust it. I still periodically export everything in tab delimited format – just in case. Once bitten, and all that.

For us it is not so critical, as all business-sensitive information, like mojo, is done within spreadsheets, once it’s invoiced. I use Fanurio to assign job numbers, time-track and invoice, if it all fell over tomorrow I could pick up almost immediately. I guess that’s the same as not really realising how important backing up is until you loose stuff.

I’d never do anything business-critical without a contingency now – well apart from the wife bit. The fact my my wife is my business partner; I suspect, wife contingencies wouldn’t go down all that well.