Freelancing isn’t anything new and most of you reading this probably have a full-time freelancing job or a freelancing gig on the side. It is a great thing that makes us financially safe that helps us earn some additional money on the side when we have free time.
Freelancing is not anything hard and you need a few things to get you started. First of all, you will need to be proficient in English both spoken and written since the bulk of your business will be done for people based in the USA or other English-speaking countries. The Next thing is a decent desktop or a laptop that will help you deal with your tasks. The strength of your equipment will depend on your freelance niche. If you will be doing articles, audiobooks and simple similar tasks you don’t need anything crazy but if you will be programming, doing artwork, video editing and other similar jobs you need a bit beefier system that will help you do that.
Now depending on the niche, you get into and depending on your work you will need to set your price somehow. You can charge your customers daily or you can do it on an hourly basis. This creates a problem for freelancers because their work makes them focus on that alone and forget about time which is important if you want to track your loss, and profit or if you are going way over budget on certain projects.
Today we are going to talk to you about ways of keeping a track of your work hours and this website will offer a great solution for that.
OK, once we said all of that let’s take the obvious thing off the checklist, shall we?! First and probably the simplest way of tracking your time is doing it the old-fashioned way – have a plan on how and when you need to finish your project and have a big clock somewhere to track your progress. Yes, it is very old-fashioned and plain but it is effective if you are organized and if you can plan your actions accordingly.
Depending on the type of freelancing job you do you need to have a plan in action if you want your project done in the best way possible. You will get a job from a client, description and special instructions and you will need to work everything out accordingly to make that happen. Every minute since you accept a job will go into the time that you needed to finish it so make sure that you keep track of that as well.
Have a notebook somewhere and write down when you started, when you took a break, when you finished and when everything is done you will need to crunch some numbers to calculate the time you needed and the payment you will ask for.
This of course has some drawbacks and they are as obvious as well. If you miss just one moment of your log book and do not write down the start or the finish time you will lose track, start guessing and then everything falls apart and you can’t, with all certainty, keep track of the information we mentioned above.
The way to go deal with this and the way to bring yourself into the 21st century and the age of modern technology is to pick a service for tracking these things. There are plenty of them out there and all of them do the same job – track these things for you and give you the results after everything is finished. The only difference between them is which of them you personally like, find easier to use, etc.
All of them will have some sort of a dashboard or a starting page that will show you and sum up all of the projects you had so far. Depending on the app or service you choose there may be info on your clients, your total income or expenditures and so on.
To successfully start one of these tracking apps or services, again depending on the one you choose, you will need to start a new project, define your time for it, define rates, and add some simple test that will explain what you are doing and that will show your customer what and how much time you spent on certain things.
These are awesome because most of them have integrated invoicing in them and after your project is done you can make an invoice for a project you had and you can mail that invoice to your customer. It will all be clear, summed up and professional which is another thing that can help you and give you a positive boost on your freelancing sites.
There is the thing every freelancer needs because time tracking in this business is important. Some of the jobs you will do will have a fixed time frame and fixed rate and it might not need you to track your time for the sake of the customer but it will be a good source of info for yourself when you undertake a similar job for someone else in the future. It will give you the ability to negotiate the price or even a time frame of the project giving you some breathing room.
Most freelancers aren’t aware of the time they spend on certain projects and they are not aware of the amount of money they potentially lose on those. Sometimes to get to the desired market you have to lower your price and work twice as long and hard as everyone else. This is what ends up costing you in the long run because without the info like this you can’t know if the jobs you do financially pay off. Knowing what you are worth and having info regarding past projects is what will make you better in this line of work and help you improve and help you negotiate.
Having a service or an app like this is a great thing. It will help you stay on track, organize and look a lot more professional. It will also allow you to focus more on what you do rather than the time spent doing it and whether you wrote yourself when you started or not.