Anything that can help streamline the day to day running of freelance business and leave you to get down to design is a good thing, In this article I’m going to run through a couple of the online tools I use to help me mange my freelance business.
Google docs
First entry has to be google docs. Google docs is a powerful online set of office tools featuring a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software. They are stored online so are easy to access and share. A good alternative with a bit more power would be openoffice
Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Analytics is a must for any website owner and developer, it gives you the ability to track monitor and measure nearly all aspects of you website stats and best of all its free and relatively easy to set up.
Freshbooks
Freshbooks is an online invoicing, time tracking and expense services, its alows you to send and mange invoves online, track you time and manage your business finances. You can start on a free account which gives you unlimited invoices and 3 clients and once your business grows you can upgrade your account as you see fit. I thought this was a great way to get started with managing my books online, and much less of a headache when it comes to the tax return.
Teamwork Project Management
On the bigger projects I work on I like to use project management tools to keep everything organised, Teamwork Project Manager lets you track and monitor projects, tasks, risks, time and project milestones. You can start on a free account of two active projects and 5 MB of space and upgrade when you need to. an alternative to Teamwork Project Manager would be Basecamp, but with no free account offered I opted to test the water with Teamwork PM.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing tool with a powerful set of tools for setting up email lists, designing email mail outs and track performace. Mail chimp offer and good range of extras such as an iphone app so you can work on the go and a easy installed wordpress plugin. Again you can start on a free account with allows you up to 500 email address and upgrade when you need too.
Do you have any tools that you use to help manage your freelance business?
Sal
On June 8th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Another tool is DeskAway (www.deskaway.com) that helps freelancers and teams organize, manage and track their work online from a central location. Simple, yet powerful.
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Milo Owolabi
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On June 21st, 2011 at 9:23 pm
I use Google analytics all the time. It is a great tool to see where you are getting your web traffic from. I highly recommend it.