I’ve been freelancing since the middle of 2006 and I’ve never been good at keep track of my workload, finances and expenses.
For a while I had a book that I noted all my work in; including the topic, publication, commission and deadline dates, expected income from it and date of payment. I lost track of this quite quickly. This year I decided to really get myself organised and I set about drawing up a Calc spreadsheet to replace the aforementioned book, figuring it would be easier to keep on top of.
At first it was just a list like the one mentioned above only this time, through the magic of computerings, I was able to colour code each entry based on status (in progress, submitted, published, paid for etc.) to make it easier to understand at a glance.
Then I started to get fancy and, having figured out how to do basic calculations on the programme, I built up a second sheet to automatically track my work based on the information I was entering on sheet 1.
I now have everything about my overall workload (words written, average price per word, total earnings, total paid, total outstanding) available at the click of a button. I’ve also broken the figures down into month-by-month and publication totals, meaning I can see how my income is doing over the course of the year, who I’m getting the most work from, who still owes me money and how much.
It’s been of huge benefit to me and if I can figure out a way to make a generic version I’ll upload it here for all to use.
Until then, here’s a few interesting statistics I’ve pulled from the file:
By the end of the month (based on the commissions I currently have) I will have:
- Written 38,760 words across 39 articles (It’s actually more than that – I only count my work for businessandfinance.ie as one article and don’t give it a word count).
- Written them for 9 different publications (3 of which are online).
- Earned more than I did in total in 2009 (bearing in mind I was teaching for half of last year and so my freelance income was lower than it could have been).
- Been paid for just over 40% of what I have earned so far this year.
- Earned most in April, which accounts for 35% of my year’s income to date.