If you’ve ever dreamed of being a freelancer, then you probably envision yourself working with clients, delivering high-quality work, and getting nice paychecks. And while all those things are definitely part of living the freelancer life, it’s important to remember that you’re also running a business. Running a business might not come naturally to some freelancers. After all, they probably got into because they love doing what they do, and not necessarily because they enjoy the business side of things. Luckily, there are a number of free and low-cost tools for Freelancers to help you run your business. To be sure, there are probably more tools out there than you’ll ever need. Here are a few of our favorites, broken down by category.
Accounting Tools
Whether you’re a solopreneur or a Fortune 500 company, accounting is an essential function to running a business. You need to be able to track expenses and know if you’re making money or not. Now, some accounting packages offer additional bells and whistles like sending invoices and processing payments, while others are more bareboned. It’s a good idea to pick one that not only fits your budget, but performs functions you need.
Xero offers a ton of options for a fairly affordable cost (their most expensive plan is $60/month). In addition to some great reporting tools, Xero offers a full suite of tools such as invoicing and payment processing, bill payment, project management, quoting, and multi-currency accounting (to name a few).
Freshbooks bills itself as an all-in-one small business invoicing and accounting system, and that’s absolutely accurate. In addition to expense tracking, invoicing, and payments, you can also track time against a project (great for those who bill hourly), and its reports give you a very clear picture of your business’ health. What’s more, it’s very simple and straight-forward user interface makes it one of the easiest tools to use.
Task Management Tools
One of the most important aspects of being a freelancer is staying on top of your assignments. Miss a deadline here or there, and it’s likely your clients won’t be too happy. These tools can help you not only keep track of individual tasks, but to plan out and manage entire projects.
Asana is one of the easiest to use task management tools out there. Its clean user interface makes creating and managing projects and tasks extremely streamlined. You can view tasks in a calendar, as a list, or as cards, giving you the flexibility to track what’s important in a way you’re most comfortable. Best of all for freelancers: It’s free for individuals who only need the most basic features.
Trello is another popular task management tool that uses what it calls “boards,” which can be thought of as individual projects. In each board are “cards,” which is like a pin board where you can stick induvial tasks. Cards can be organized any way you want, and you can move tasks between cards, assign them to other users (if you’re working on a team), or add in as many details as you need.
File Management Tools
Whether you’re a freelance writer, developer, voice artist, or other type of freelancer, chances are you have to organize, receive, and send a lot of files. Keeping them on your own hard drive is probably not the best idea; what happens if something happens to your laptop and you can’t access them? It’s essential to both have a backup and away to access files from anywhere at any time.
Dropbox is a great tool for storing, managing, and sending files. It offers a wide range of plans to fit just about any budget, and the lowest level plan comes with a nice 2 TB storage. You can easily share files with anyone, and it automatically creates file backups that you can go back to in case you accidentally mess something up. It also offers a sync feature that allows you to store files on your hard drive and have them mirrored online, making files easily accessible at your office or on the go.
Probably one of the most well-known platforms, Google Drive offers a nice 15 GB of free storage. You can use it to store and share any type of file, whether or not you use any of Google’s suite of tools (Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.).
Automation Tools
If managing a number of different software packages sounds like a pain, there’s a couple of automation solutions to make your life easier. Some of these platforms automatically connect and share data with each other, but for instances where they don’t, you need something that makes it easy.
Zapier is a powerful web application that essentially enables you to automate common tasks when two applications need to share data. For example, you could create a “zap” that creates a folder in Dropbox whenever you create a new client in your accounting system. Their free version offers 100 tasks/month, which is perfect for a small freelancer to get started.
IFTTT stands for “If This Then That,” and works very similarly to Zapier. The difference is that IFTT is typically geared towards more personal software, though it offers connections with many of the top business software platforms as well. The best news: It’s 100 percent free.
Want more free tools, tips, and tricks for freelancers? Keep an eye on this blog, as we add new info all the time.
