Freelance Essentials: Creating a Productive Tech Stack for Success

As a solopreneur or freelancer working remotely, a basic component to the progress of your business is finding a stack of technologies and tools to help you smoothen out and improve your everyday tasks.

Indeed, you might receive the rewards of working from home or from any place you choose and hand-picking the clients you work with and the undertakings you execute, yet there's a great deal in the background that goes into guaranteeing you're ready to keep up with the demands of work. Activities such as dealing with your finances — which involves paying taxes, tracking expenses, and submitting invoices — guaranteeing a smooth and predictable work process and handling business prospects proactively.

As tedious as this may appear on a superficial level, these technologies tackle issues that — as a freelancer— no other person will address for you. Luckily, innovation development has managed the cost for us with a wealth of technologies to solve these necessities. You can think about the big picture before attacking the details and deal with these obligations impeccably. Assuming that you're new to freelancing or are hoping to renew your stack of tools, consider adding these components to the tech stack:

🏆 Freelance Fact!

Outsourcing insights show that 65% of freelancers use apps or other tech devices to deal with their projects and day-to-day tasks

#1 Invoicing and Financing

There are a couple of things to remember concerning financing. You'll need to effectively have the option to monitor your expenses so you can deduct them for taxes as required. You'll likewise need a method for receiving payment from your clients. It's not super complicated as far as how you need to keep your funds all together as a consultant, yet there are a lot of choices out there, which can make it overpowering when picking an application.

One application that is recommended for invoicing is Plutio. It can be used to collect payment. The application allows you to keep track of invoices and customize invoices all in one place. You can then effectively automate the process of adding these to your bookkeeping application, such as Freshbooks, QuickBooks, or something else, with a tool like Make and the powerful API of Plutio.

#2 Website

Except you work from a freelance platform, where you'll need to compete on price and give a percentage to the website, you'll probably require a place to collect leads, show testimonials, and share your portfolio. This is where your site comes in, and there are many choices here, like other things on this list of tech tools. Your abilities and assets will determine the direction you take to build your site. For example, if you're a marketing specialist with practically zero website design knowledge, choosing a straightforward web designer like WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace could be the best.

If you're a website developer and are willing to do all the hard work, you may already know what to use. A website is recommended as it provides you with a ton of adaptability and allows you to automate and streamline your lead collection and more. You can likewise effectively link other applications such as analytics tools, email tools, promotional tools, automated updates, and social media posts on your blog, and the sky is the limit from there.

If you're a web programmer, you'll probably know how to construct a more custom website as of now. You could use Directus or Strapi as a CMS with a custom front-end that draws content from other sources. You must guard against developing a site that will take much of your time. In addition, you may also need to choose a reputable company to host your website, and with that, check an article from The Bear Digital about the Top 10 Best Web Hosting Companies in the World.

#3 Accounting Software

If you ask a lot of freelancers, they will most certainly concur that they didn't pursue their profession so they could become accountants and assume the additional work of accounting. In any case, as the platitude goes, responsibility comes with freedom, and in the gig economy, dealing with your finances is a must.

The uplifting news is there are a lot of applications that can assist you with filing your expenses, creating invoices, and giving a preview of the monetary details of your business with your laptop or cell phone. What's more, AND CO's application, for instance, incorporates a feature for invoicing that enables you to present an invoice in less than 25 seconds.

These can depend on ad-hoc milestones or auto-produced repeatedly for a week for month-to-month or weekly gigs, depending on what is ideal for you and the nature of your work. The application also assists you in the development of the follow-up to safeguard you against getting stuck. In particular, when a client has seen your receipt, you'll get an alert and be able to send a reminder when it's the ideal time for them to make payment. 

According to a client viewpoint, AND CO's adaptable installment payment option simplifies payment and makes it quick to receive installments via invoicing. With the choice to match up with PayPal and Stripe and with a simple click of a button, installments can be completed, thus making their lives and yours easier. This is because the fewer steps required to pay you, the quicker you get paid. It's an example of a mutually beneficial arrangement.

The expense reporting section of AND CO will assist you with monitoring every one of your bills and receipts, and you can bill your clients through your invoices so you don't have to take time from your work and go through separate processes.

🏆 Freelance Trivia

As per statistics, 67% of freelancers use email applications to communicate with their clients.

#4 Portfolio Tools

Picking your freelance tech stack implies having the right applications to get clients. Without a portfolio, no freelancer can prove their worth. This could be a blog, a site, or a digital portfolio to exhibit your work.

You can direct prospective clients to learn more about your skills with a portfolio. They can view your previous work and choose whether to recruit you. Consider choosing an entire site rather than only a portfolio to boost this opportunity. Your site can showcase samples of your work, gather leads, as well as enable clients to reach you, place orders through a form, and keep growing your credibility.

#5 Project Management Tools 

One of the undeniable components intrinsic to the idea of freelance work is improving your tasks with undertakings like sending emails, taking notes, planning meetings, and monitoring project details. You need to bookmark these tools to assist you with prioritizing your tasks to focus your time on the job within reach without burning energy on the little tasks.

Trello is known as a task and project management application that uses lists and boards to visualize the managing and delegating of assignments for yourself or others in your group. You can install and add comments, attachments, and checklists to any task for more straightforward cooperation and execution. It has a drag-and-drop feature to make things easier.

Asana is a mobile and web application incorporating schedules, projects, tasks, conversations, and dashboards. These features can be utilized differently, including creating project formats, setting due dates, parsing out bigger undertakings into smaller assignments, and working with file-sharing features.

Evernote is a portable mobile application for taking notes compatible with different configurations such as text, sound, photograph, PDF, video, etc. Thoughts can be effortlessly coordinated through accessible notes, notepads, to-do lists, and checklists and are available via synchronizing content across gadgets, including PCs, tablets, and telephones.

#6 Social Media and Email Tools

Both email marketing and social media are beneficial for freelancers. From collecting leads to cold outreach, you will see your business develop significantly if you can master this part of your marketing.

Regarding social media, while you'll probably need to auto-post a few social posts, such as posting on Facebook and Twitter, you'll need to have a constant flow of posts related to the service you offer. To do this, you can make content schedules for your posts beforehand. Hootsuite can be used for scheduling posts.

Hashtags can also be used to increase the visibility of your post. For this, flick hashtags can be used. As for email, to send email messages regularly to your list of subscribers, you can do that with a website like MailerLite, Mailchimp, or Convertkit.

#7 Tax Software

There is no need to trivialize that taxes can be quite complicated for freelancers. For novices particularly, their first tax assessment season is a significant learning curve that makes them more knowledgeable about what their status as self-employed means for their incentives and how they are taxed.

From what's untouchable versus exploring the many 1099 forms and deciding what will be written off, there's something extra to comprehend and fundamentally more to the cycle. This is especially true now that you have to deal with more than one W-2 that, once documented, you don’t have to consider in the future.

In conclusion, establishing an effective tech toolkit as a freelancer is vital for optimizing productivity and success. By thoroughly selecting the right mix of tools to integrate into your workflow seamlessly, you can streamline tasks such as managing finances, invoicing clients, showcasing your portfolio, and efficiently organizing projects. These essential resources empower you to focus on delivering high-quality work and nurturing client relationships, ultimately enhancing your freelance journey.

Whether you're just starting or looking to improve your own existing toolkit, investing in these indispensable technologies is key to maximizing efficiency and achieving your goals in the freelance world.