Essential tools to manage your freelance projects and your clients
Sometimes things that start out much more complex become much simpler the more you look at them. Take this list for example: I wanted it to be a comprehensive list of 5–6 tools I use for putting together freelance projects, with a snappy title like “The 5 Essential Tools you need to earn 💰💰💰”, but then, the longer I thought about it, the more I pared down the list until I was left with just two tools. It’s not as snappy of a title, but really, the more you simplify your workflow, the easier it will become to manage your products and your clients.
So here are, the only two tools I use for freelance web development projects:
Invoicing — Manta.life
Manta is a mac desktop app that makes creating invoices not just painless, but actually.. enjoyable? It has a really beautiful interface and is great for splitting projects line by line, adding discounts, taxes, or notes. The app is still in beta so there are a few kinks to work out — I would love a feature to duplicate invoices and to sort them on the main view (currently all the pending, paid, cancelled invoices are in one place) — but Manta is already miles better than doing invoices in Microsoft Word or Excel.
Project Management — Notion.so
I started using Notion after a coworker mentioned it last about a year and a half ago. Notion was still in beta at the time, but their team was incredibly responsive to every email I sent. If there was a bug or a feature, they would fix it in less than a week every single time. I use Notion to take notes during meetings, to project manage ongoing projects, and as a way to keep my to-do list sane. Here’s some types of documents I make on the platform:
Client Development Roadmap
I use Notion for putting together website development proposals based on the initial client discovery and information. In these docs, I include things like current concerns, visual references, site goals, and key client requirements. Once the proposal is accepted, I start putting together my invoice.
Organizing work resources
To organize upcoming Medium posts, sort knowledge base articles, and keep resources on hand, I make a list of pages. I have a page for my work with Le Wagon, a page for books I want to read, a page for useful articles on CSS/Git/Vue.js /etc.
Creating estimates for freelance clients
I’ve whited-out a few things from this image to protect client privacy, but I’ll usually Notion to map out project estimates for clients before I send them an invoice. This is more of an internal estimate based on user story or based on deliverables and I’ll use it to send a more detailed message to the client. When I am working on the project, I will track the projected hours versus the actual hours to see whether I am under or over budget.
Honorable Mentions
- iCal — I still haven’t found a better calendar app than the apple iCal (but seriously, I’m looking, because iCal is quite mediocre). The reason I mention it is because I cannot function without calendar reminders. As soon as I schedule a client meeting or a deadline, I plug it into my iCal or else I will 100% forget the meeting.
- EverNote — my first note-taking love before Notion, I still use EverNote for things like my lecture notes at Le Wagon because I’ve found that it works much better offline. For things that require organization, I still vastly prefer Notion, but EverNote is my go-to for jotting down things quickly.
- Trello — Trello is great for visual people, but I’ve found that for managing large projects where you need documentation, visuals, etc, Trello just gets way too overwhelming to manage. It’s a great soft landing into the Kanban workflow though.
- Slack — Although Slack has constant issues connecting to their servers in China, it’s still the best tool to communicate between teams, send status updates, and react with ::party-parrot:: emojis.
Thank you so much for reading! What are some of your favorite tools? Are there any essentials I missed? I would love to hear about them below.
