Does the Average Freelancer Juggle Too Many Tools? Why Centralization is the Future

Freelancers have plenty to balance and think of—the most important being, finding and retaining clients. However most freelancers spend most of their time organizing paperwork and locating files on their computer and sorting through emails. Not efficient. Not fun.

If you’re just starting out, you may be trying to budget the number of tools you use. $20 per month for a tool does not seem like a huge payment. But add in the different accounting, invoicing, and organization tools a freelancer often utilizes, the bill quickly add up. Here are the common tools a freelancer often uses—and why they may not be the most future-forward choice.

Table of Contents

Excel

Ordering and accounting services

Timesheet App

Organizing tools

Why we’re changing how freelancers work

Excel This is perfect—a perfect storm, that is. While it’s useful for a low-grade snapshot of a To-Do list, an Excel sheet is difficult to manipulate. It’s perfect for business modeling, but does little to inform freelancers of what’s missing or what’s ahead. Excel is a bit bulky to organize clients and their needs. 21st century freelancers need flexibility in how they input and view information, like on their mobile devices.

Ordering and Accounting Services These kinds of tools are useful for small businesses, which make online ordering and accounting easier to do for freelancers. Most digital tools start around $20 a month, to do a few simple tasks like to sell digital downloads of your graphics. But it’s another small tool to pay for. Freelancers do need these kinds of tools for peace of mind, but accounting tools may have different requirements and may not align to your own website, or may require you to manually input data on a laptop, versus your mobile. Bookkeeping needs to be fully digitized, including how you actually input and export information.

Timesheet App A freelancer’s time is more precious than a full-time employees, technically. Nearly everything is by hour or per project, versus negotiation a yearly salary. Some freelancers and clients prefer time tracking software. It’s a great way to gain insight into billable hours and what tasks are taking most of your time. Though this is yet another website to log into, another application to download. Depending on the service, prices start around $12 per person for unlimited projects.

Organizing Tools You’ve got plenty to do. Lists are often a freelancer’s best friend. Wunderlist is a popular list app. It works on different platforms and you can even assign tasks to another person. The issue with having an organization tool to manage the rest of your tasks—it’s another thing to remember. It may be useful for task management, but the most helpful action in accomplishing tasks is having everything you need under one roof. Sure, you can check what you need to do, but then have to go through all the trouble of logging into other portals, apps, and email accounts to finish said tasks.

Why We're Changing How Freelancers Work: We’re centralizing all these tools—and more—into one, easily-accessible space. Our customers can log in and view their time tracking sheet or invoices on their mobile. They view and manage their list of tasks. Instead of shifting to another tool or via email, they simply can do them immediately through Freework, like send an invoice. Freelancers already do plenty of tool and task juggling. They have to monitor their money, accounting, client information, promotion, and proposals to name a few.

Freework [https://freework.com/] simplifies daily life.

It’s not another tool to add to the pile of useful tools—helpful, but still a pile. It’s where our customers find peace of mind. Freelancers will dominate the workforce by 2020. The upsides of being a freelancer are many, including flexibility of being your own boss. The challenging aspect is that freelancer’s become responsible for every area of their life, from health insurance to accounting. The future of freelancing is greater flexibility and stronger centralization of these tasks.