Money Management Tips For Freelancers And Contractors

Being a successful freelancer or contractor doesn’t just take insight, confidence, and bags of creativity. You also need to be on track with your finances – not doing so can be perilous, since earning from job to job requires a steady income stream, knowing your expertise is duly valued throughout the year.

Hence the following money management tips, presented to give you the best chance of staying on the ball with your accounts. Take heed of this advice, and grasp your financial status with both hands…

Assess your outgoings

Whether you’re working from home, sharing an office space, or constantly on the move, there are a couple of costs that you’re likely to deal with. They can encompass anything from line rental charges to petrol top-ups as you drive between meetings, and they can accumulate viciously if they burn through your funds at random.

To get a real overview of your outgoings, monitor your spending in a week, and then a month, to see if there’s a pattern. By building a picture of your expenses, you can ensure you price your services at a level that covers your outgoings, while leaving ample funds for tax and take home pay.

Make sure your pricing is clear

People aren’t always great communicators. Or, if we try to be, a lot of that clarity depends on our method of discussion, as opposed to what we’re trying to say. Clients can easily lose track of costs; if you speak via email, or over the phone, there are many opportunities to be misconstrued.

Thanks to free project management tools like Skwish, online quoting and approvals is simple, displaying every additional service you’re able to provide, and how much it costs. It definitely beats starting work on a project that was agreed upon, only to find that things turn sour when it’s time to invoice.

Know your real-time value

As assignments fly at you thick and fast, you’d be forgiven for letting a true portrait of your earnings fall apart. It’s hard to master your accounts at the best of times, and when you’re swamped with fresh deadlines, chasing invoices when you can, your cash flow can be hard to decode.

Skwish dives to the rescue again, laying out your status as it stands in real time. You can see what’s been completed for each client, what’s still to do, and whether you’ve been paid for it. The amount of hours you’ve worked are assigned their secure, monetary value, allowing for an accurate cross-reference of the manpower you’re putting in vs. what’s been gained from it.

If you allow a hazy financial perception to grow, it’ll swallow your sense of order, making invoicing and tax submissions extremely troublesome. As such, freelancers or contractors looking to sleep easily might check out Skwish’s pro-finance features.

They’re just some of the project management solutions we’ve dreamt up, along with bug tracking, client approval systems and remote project control. Streamline your finances, and reap the benefits of a steadier income as you climb in stature.