Starting a Freelancer Career: Do You Need to Upgrade Your Tech?

To be a successful freelancer, you must have the right tech tools to get the job done right.

Freelancers constitute a large section of the American workforce. According to the Freelancers Union, they number well over 50 million today. They work in fields such as graphic design, writing, and consulting to name but a few. But to be a successful freelancer, you must have the right tech tools to get the job done right. They will help you in time management, organization, business operations, and accounting. So, if you are starting a freelancer career you must ask yourself whether you need to upgrade your tech. If so, here are some tech tools that will make your work easier.

1. Time Management Tools

• Self Control – As the name implies, Self Control is for you if you are easily distracted from your work. It blocks distracting sites like Twitter and Facebook. And if reading and responding to emails takes up too much of your time, you can use it to block your email server.
• Rescue Time -Rescue time is a great tool to have if you bill by the hour. It tracks how much time you spend on websites and applications. And interestingly enough, it even notes down how long you are away from your workstation. If sites like Twitter or Facebook prove to be too distracting, it can block them for you as well.

2. Organization

• Trello – Trello is a project management tool. It keeps track of all ideas and tasks, whether they are complete or incomplete. The most attractive feature of Trello is its ease-of-use. A drag-and-drop feature makes moving items from one category to another extremely easy.
• Memory – You’ll usually have to deal with a couple issues if you stick with the amount of memory your laptop came with. One is your performance issues, and the second is a time lapse in being able to switch between tasks. Most of the time, buying extra RAM is good when you first start freelancing, especially if you’re working on big projects. You can buy cheap RAM from sites like offtek.co.uk if you need to improve your laptop’s performance.
• Google Drive – Another issue you might face when storing data is dealing with damage or losing your device. Also, keeping track of documents on your drive will get harder as they increase. Google Drive solves these problems in one go. It allows you to store and compile your documents in one place. You can also share and export them to other people and never have to worry about data loss ever again.

  

3. Accounting

• Quickbooks – Quickbooks is one of the most comprehensive accounting applications on the planet. It is also one of the cheapest. Quickbooks bundles together 150 third-party apps that can do every accounting task you throw at them. Furthermore, it is user-friendly and comes with solid support services.
• FreshBooks – Keeping your books in order is a daunting task if you are not an accountant. Fortunately, Freshbooks is designed for non-accountants. This cloud-based accounting system calculates billable hours, taxes, expenses, and totals. It then generates invoices, expense reports, and quarterly summaries among others.

If you’re a freelancer, you should consider opting for one or two of these software solutions to make your job easier. Using the right tech tools will allow you to manage your project and finances better, which ultimately leads to better productivity.

Starting a Freelancer Career: Do You Need to Upgrade Your Tech? appeared first on Mompreneur Media