The Doers Guide to freelance admin and working from home

The To Do List
Written By Guest User

A handy list of all the things you need to think about when freelancing and working from home with links, apps, and resources to help lighten the load.

When you’re working for yourself you have to wear all the hats - admin, finance, website, marketing - and that’s before you’ve even started on your day job! So we’ve pulled together some handy links and apps to help you keep on top of all of your admin and stay super organised, even when working from home.

What’s best is that we’ll keep adding to this list when we find something new or when one of the freelancers we interview in our ‘The Freelancer Life’ series recommends something golden.

A freelancer resource guide for the freelance community by the freelance community - let’s get stuck in! 

Admin Tools

IPSE

The Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed - full of information, reports, money tips, and tricks it’s certainly worth a follow or become a member if you can afford to. Add IPSE discounts and offers into freelancer resource bible

Accounting software

We use QuickBooks for all of our accounting. Of all of the apps and software programs out there we found it the easiest one to get our heads around. It syncs with your bank account and makes keeping on top of receipts, taxes, and VAT a breeze. If your financial needs are a little simpler, then Coconut comes highly recommended to us, it’s app is easy to use and it will help you keep on top of all of your, bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax all in one place.

Website

If you’re looking to build your own website we HIGHLY recommend SquareSpace. Even for the not-so-tech-savvy, it’s easy to work with, offers you lots of templates and you can quickly and easily build newsletters, mailing lists, a blog, and a shop into the mix. We’ve used it for our website and we can’t stop singing its praises!

Pension

When you set up on your own, a pension is easily forgotten amongst all of the admin and new hats you have to wear but it’s SO IMPORTANT - your future self with thank you for it, we promise!

Penfold is the go-to for self-employed pensions. Set up your account in 5 minutes, use their handy pension calculator and start saving for your future today. We even have a special Doers offer for you - use the link in this post or the reference code ‘thedoers’ and Penfold will put £25 straight into your pension pot for you when you open an account - wonderful stuff!

For more information, a full downloadable report, and lots of advice and tips it’s also worth reading what the IPSE has to say about pensions for freelancers here too.

Maternity pay

One of the trickier parts of working for yourself when you’re pregnant or are planning to have children is maternity pay. The forms can be overwhelming, the process long-winded and the outcome not as you hoped. It’s worth taking the time to do this properly and do not leave it to the last minute as it will bite you in the bum! A few articles and links which Laura found really helpful when applying for hers were:

Setting your rates

This is always such a difficult thing to do and can be a real stumbling block when you’re first starting out as a freelancer but is also something that you should come back to every year. There’s a lot of confusion, anxiety, and self-doubt around the process so we highly recommend downloading the Work Notes Freelancer Pricing Guide to cut through the confusion and help you land at the right rate.

Business Banking

After a year using a Barclays Business account, we were sick and tired of having to reconnect to QuickBooks 15 times a day, lugging around a fob, not being able to log on to the app, or speak to anyone, ever. So when we heard about Starling’s business account we were over the moon. Their sign-up process is top-notch, so simple to do, and with no need to leave the comfort of your house or send off a form. The switch-over process couldn’t have been easier, they did it all for us - moving over all of our direct debits, transferring any payments for up to 36 months, and closing our account. Their chat facility through the app is speedy and if they can’t give you the answer there and then they get back to you very quickly. You’re notified as soon as you’ve received payment and can save money in pots to keep VAT payments or tax aside - we’ve never felt more in control of our money.

Helpful Apps

Zoom

With more and more people working from home and a boom in demand for online courses, Zoom is worth having. There are different price points depending on how much you think you’ll use it and how many people you need to join your calls and it works on desktop and your phone - we’ve started using it recently and it’s working like a dream.

Headspace

We’ve been using Headspace for years now, we have to admit we’re dabblers rather than avid users but with more and more time spent at home, it’s going to become a firm favourite again. The app is so simple to you, very well thought through and the animations, goals and bite-size chunks make it really manageable and you can just feel your shoulders relaxing as you give yourself a much needed 10 minutes out to relax, breathe and unwind.

Evernote

You never know when a great idea will pop into your mind and having one place to keep and make sense of all your little light bulb moments whilst on the go can be really helpful. We use Evernote to take notes anywhere, find information faster and share ideas with anyone from meeting notes to creative ideas and to-do lists - never miss a 3am cracker ever again. 

Canva

A simplified graphic design tool, Canva allows you to create stand-out presentations and social media graphics without a graphic designer. It’s simple to use and comes with tonnes of templates and layouts. You can add your logo, or even use it to create a logo, and set your brand colours to help make your work look super! For more Canva tips and tricks, have a peek at our recent blog post.

Later

If you want to stay on top of your own social media Later is a scheduling tool that is easy to use and can help you to plan and schedule content across all of your social channels. Both the desktop and app versions are pretty self-explanatory and if you can carve out even half an hour a week to plan and schedule your content you’ll be onto a winner!

Notion

There are a lot of project management tools out there that offer a basic package but you really need to pay out to get something that will really help you to keep on top of your project work. We use Notion and their free package still ticks a lot of boxes for us. Create and manage multiple projects and have a page for individual client work as well as the all-important board for your own business to keep on top of your ever-growing to-do list.

Slack

If you’re collaborating with other freelancers or teams, slack is a great way to chat and keep on top of conversations without clogging up your inbox or WhatsApp. You can have different chats for different projects and can quickly and easily share links and interesting articles for all to see.

Clockify

If you need a programme to track all of the time you’re spending across different clients we highly recommend Clockify. It’s easy to set up for different clients or projects through their website and once set up the app is really simple to use to track on the go, and best of all it’s all free!

 

We’ll be adding to this list regularly so if you have any recommendations of admin to consider and ways to make it super easy let us know!

 
Guest User
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