Manage Your Freelance Business Better with These Tools

Let’s admit it – we often want to be taken more seriously as freelancers. While telecommuting and remote jobs are on the steady rise, some folks still think of freelancers as a more affordable, less professional substitution to hiring an agency. Let’s break that stigma once and for all!

To win more work, give the following tools a thorough test-drive:

Shoeboxed

Monthly accounting and taxing season is one of the two least events things in the freelance life. The Shoeboxed web and mobile app helps you to keep all things neat. You can scan all your receipts and business cards, organize them into respective categories, create expense report effortlessly and even order pre-paid envelopes to stuff all your paper data inside and have the wizard Shoebox team to digitalize it for you.

eSignLive

Obviously, each freelance deal you have should be backed up with a professional signed contract. Printing, signing and scanning the documents takes heaps of time. Automate your client onboarding workflow with eSign Live app. You can capture signatures directly on your website or out in the field during a meeting through your mobile phone or laptop. This app helps you to ensure that the disclosures have been reviewed and accepted before signing, prevent from receiving documents with missing signatures from multiple signers and protects all the contract data with advanced authentication options.

FreshBooks

Tired of tracking down multiple invoices, organizing them monthly and paying significant PayPal fees? FreshBooks effortlessly solves all of these three problems. You can create and send out professional invoices in just few minutes, using pre-designed and saved templates; track all your billable hours and incorporate them into the invoice; track your business income and expenses and securely accept credit cards and pay a flat 0.50$ fee for processing PayPal payments.

Rapportive

Rapportive helps you craft better LOI and sales letters when hunting for clients. This free Gmail add-on will scrape the public data on your contact – LinkedIn profile summary, social media profiles, Skype name and shared connections – and display everything in a neat box inside your email. You can instantly get to know how to personalize your client proposal and who’s emailing you with a service enquiry.

Cushion

This app will help you stay sane and avoid the vicious feast and famine cycles even the most seasoned freelancers are prone to. This sleek app will visualize your schedule to help you plan time ahead and book clients more evenly; measure your income and build up prediction curves for the subsequent months; track your spending habits to hint how much money you need to earn and whether you should tighten your belt a bit in the next month. Cushion is here to optimize your schedule, help you stay less stressed about the future.

SpeedLancer

Forgot about the fast approaching deadline? Got stuck on another project? Head to SpeedLancer for an extra pair of hands to help you out. Dubbed as the “Uber of freelancing” this new marketplace allows to create projects or choose from existing offers, which would be completed in just 4 hours. You can order a blog post, urgent web research for any topic, transcription services, logo and infographics design and a bunch of other micro tasks you can outsource to save your reputation and avoid burnouts.

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Written by:
Dianna is a former ESL teacher and World Teach volunteer, currently living in France. She's slightly addicted to apps and viral media trends and helps different companies with product localization and content strategies. You can tweet her at @dilabrien
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