Tools & Workflows for Freelancers
I’m a Berlin based freelance visual artist and art director. With this article I’m sharing some insights about the organisational part of my business.
Big thanks to Marius Jopen for getting there.
🤖
Sync and Backup
I was using Dropbox for almost 8 years when I decided to change my online filestorage to Google Drive. The main reason for that is, that Google Drive can natively store and link Google Docs, which I’m using heavily. Another reason is the pricing as well as the fact that I’m using a lot of Google services anyways and it makes the number of services I’m using a bit smaller, which nowadays is really important to me.
Google Drive is fine for medium scale data sizes. I have a 1TB subscription and use it for all my active projects (personal and business), as well as all my main assets (documents, photos, music, software, etc.).
For my archive which is around 5TB, I’m using Amazon Web Storage (AWS), since it’s way cheaper and I’m able to store my files on a German server instead of one in the US, for example.
I’m using an FTP tool like Cyberduck to upload completed projects and store them in several Amazon S3 buckets. I set up an automation which shifts my files from the Amazon S3 storage to the Amazon Glacier storage after 14 days which is again cheaper. The only payoff is that if you want to download your files from the Glacier storage it takes around 3h to retrieve the files you’re looking for.
Besides backing up specific projects manually I’m also doing a backup of my whole laptop every 3h (adjustable) with a tool called Arq. It’s automatically uploading the backup into my Amazon backup bucket, which is pretty nifty.
Sometimes you want to work with more than one cloud-service. In my case I have my personal Google Drive account which is synced on my Mac, but also have a Google Drive account from work and another one from the university I’m lecturing at and I need to access and sync all of them from the same machine. Unfortunately there is no build-in option from Google to do so natively, as far as I know. So I’m using Odrive which is a nice tool that lets you connect as many cloud accounts as you want and sync them to your machine. Another major advantage to Dropbox and Google Drive is that you can work with aliases. This means you see all your files in the right folders but they get synced only, if you access them. This saves you a lot of space on your machine and is definitely more advanced than the “selective sync” function that Dropbox and Google Drive offer.
For more in depth thoughts about how to organise your files just have a look at my article Filemanagement for Motion Designers.
Finances
This is a big topic especially for small companies or self employed freelancers as I am. I did quite some research on that topic and I’m happy to share my insights within this article.
I have quite a bunch of different accounts and assets, that I was trying to monitor and manage with only one single tool, for quite a while. Now I’m pretty happy with a tool called MoneyMoney that has a lot of possibilities in this direction. The following accounts I got integrated until now:
- checking account work
- checking account private
- checking account studio
- creditcard work
- creditcard private
- savings account
- PayPal account
- Coinbase account
- OnVista stock depot
- Cash in my safe
- and finally my Riester-pension account 😬
There are integrations / APIs for all of them except for my stock depot, my Riester account and obviously the cash in my safe. The Coinbase integration is available here.
Another nice feature in MoneyMoney is that you can categorise every payment and especially automate the categorisation. Let’s say you have a category for Entertainment you can automatically categorise all payments with the term Netflix or alike, appearing in the transaction. I categorise every payment.
You can also eliminate internal transfers which usually mess up your turnover. Let’s say you transfer 1000€ from your checking account to your credit card you would have 1000€ in your expenses and 1000€ in your income, which ends up in higher expenses and revenues than you actually have and this distorts your balance. You don’t want that and you can avoid that with the app.
That’s the categories I’m using:
The biggest gap in the tracking the cashflow is actually the cash payments. There are a lot of expense tracking apps in the app-store. The one I use at the moment is called Expense OK. Generally just make sure to check the data export functions of the tool you choose before you start tracking your expenses!
Accounting
Luckily there is a lot happening in the accounting for small businesses field or FinTech in general. A lot of banks integrating accounting functions into their online tools. Some good examples are Holvi a finish startup that I’m using since two years to organise all the payments, invoicing and taxes for the 10 members of the Random Collective Coworking space I’m running. There were big improvements made within this time. With functions like automatic linking of invoices to payments (via reference numbers) it is really helping me a lot to organise pending, paid, open, etc. invoices and payments of the members each month.
Other interesting banking solutions are:
Besides these bank startups there a lot of accounting services without a bank account like:
Going in detail with all the pros and cons of these services would go beyond the scope of this article and might be covered in another article.
After testing LexWare and FreshBooks I couldn’t find exactly what I needed, so I build my own accounting setup in Google Docs (spreadsheets), which I’m pretty happy with at the moment. It is definitely not the easy way, but gives you a maximum of freedom and countless input and output possibilities, especially if you combine it with some powerful IFTTT actions.
Messaging
Apart from emailing I’m using these common messengers for chat-based conversations:
- Facebook Messenger
- Google Hangouts
- Skype
- Slack
- Telegram
A nice tool to have them all in one place is a free Google Chrome Extension called All In One Messenger. You can connect almost every messenger out there with it and you can also connect several accounts of the same messenger. So for example if you’re running more than one Facebook account and you have a lot of correspondence going on, you can easily access both account’s messenges at the same time.
I’m still trying to keep my communication channels limited. I mainly use Facebook messenger for private conversations and Slack for everything business. Skype and Google Hangouts are close to cease for me.
Passwords and account infos
It’s always the same. You just want to book a flight and you end up in a painful running the gauntlet. Passwords you don’t remember, creditcard infos or a Passport number you don’t have at hand, you name it.
To get the password problem tamed I use LastPass which is saving all your passwords in a neat way in one place. There are lot of similar tools like 1Password or EnPass for example doing more or less the same.
In addition to this I’m using a Google Doc listing all contract details, numbers and things you always need, but never remeber.
Of course it’s crucial to NOT put passwords or sensitive details inside!
Project Management & CRM
I find it quite hard to find the right project management and CRM tool for me.
I was using Basecamp and Asana for a while with companies I worked with. Now using Trello for my coworking space and Airtable with another Design Team I’m collaborating with.
I always found Asana and Basecamp a bit clunky and just not nice to look at with designers eyes. Trello is easy to use and pretty reduced, but it just feels a bit like “just too many lists”. At the moment I think Airtable is quite promising, but it’s still too early for me to judge.
Spotify
Last but not least:
Did you ever want to save your weekly mix from Spotify?
If so the bad news is, that Spotify is not natively offering an option for that, but the good news is there is a little IFTTT action for that.
