An Entrepreneur’s Tools: Part 2

Sophia Kelly from Tailored Tech

I have been self-employed for 20 years. I work from home. In order to stay focused I've developed some systems that work for me. Here are some of them. 

Cash Flow Planning

When I talk about self-employment with friends, they often say that they would find it hard to not have a reliable income. I'm not saying it's not something I worry about from time to time, but I have some systems that keep me safe financially that work for me. 

One of the financial tools I use is You Need a Budget. It allows me to put aside monthly amounts to pay my tax instalments and GST. I can input my regular and irregular expenses and then allocate all money that comes in to them in priority order. It lets me budget a few months out, so I can make sure I not only have this month's expenses covered, but also next months and the month after that. There is an app on my phone and a web based interface with more detail. The reports are adequate for me to use to prepare my own taxes as well. 

Time Tracking and Invoicing

I use Harvest to track my billable and overhead time, retainers (I usually get a 50% retainer up front), billable expenses and to do my invoicing. The invoices are lovely, and you can email them right from the interface with a personal note of your choice. There are add ons to add credit card payments and such, but I don't use them. The interface allows me to select how the billable time is chosen, and whether it is summarized by project, by activity type, or in full detail by instance.  When I purchase something for a client, like hosting or domain registration, I input it into Harvest along with a file containing the receipt. When I invoice I can add an automatically generated expense report. It also allows me to track budgets for projects, and will email me when a threshhold is reached, such as 80% of the budget. Harvest has an app so I can even track time in the field. 

Project Management

Harvest integrates with my project management tool, Teamwork. Teamwork also has time tracking and invoicing but their invoices don't have the ability to charge tax or some other detail I need. However, I can engage the Harvest timer right from Teamwork. I set up each client with their own task list in Teamwork, and can forward any email requests from clients to a custom address for each list or project to automatically add it as a task. It also generates Gant charts to help me visualize project timelines, which I really like. The other feature I like is that it allows me to set task dependencies, so that I can set it to hide tasks that I can't do yet, because there are other tasks that need to be done first.

These are some of my most valuable tools that I work with in my business. I hope you will find them useful as well. 

LINKS:

Sophia’s Company Site - https://goodthingsbetter.com/

Harvest - https://www.getharvest.com/
Teamwork - https://www.teamwork.com/
You Need A Budget - https://www.youneedabudget.com/