Smashing eBook_ Professional Workflow for Web Designers - Luke Reimer [16]
The Finances of Freelancing
We’re not accountants… We’re web designers. Especially when working as an individual rather than as part of a team, many freelancers get caught up in focusing on the web sites that they create rather than the necessary practices surrounding each project. These practices can aid in a number of ways, such as stress-relieving organization, more efficient time management, a better understanding of costs and pricing, and ultimately how your freelance work fits into your overall annual income.
The Foundation
Record keeping and analysis are foundational to financial efforts, whether we like it or not. Tracking time spent and corresponding tasks during a project is crucial to better understanding your freelance work from a high level. It doesn’t need to entail an hour-by-hour log – even estimating time spent at the close of a project, when these figures are fresh in your mind, can do the trick. The bottom line is, before you can seek to improve or tighten up your freelance finances you need to accurately understand where you currently stand.
The three elements of keeping records are time, income, and expenses. If you can record these for each project, and how the three of these interact – you’re in great shape to begin analyzing how you can better stay organized and even increase your revenues.
Maximizing Profit
What to Invoice For
Our income as web designers is relatively straight forward – we get paid for a web project according to a price predetermined in project planning and client interaction. However, it’s a good practice to develop a more detailed invoice than just the overall project cost.
Common lines on your invoice can include administrative time spent documenting and organizing the project, overhead for managing contractors or project management, materials such as stock photography/fonts and any special software requirements, and conference calls, travel, and meetings. It can feel a little uncomfortable at first billing for things like administration or cost per kilometer for travel, but these are generally accepted practices that most clients engage in themselves.
Quoting Best Practices
The project quote or bid is where your project income all begins. There are entire articles written on this topic alone – and it’s best to do the research to determine both how to go about quoting a project with a client, and how to quote accurately (not too high, not too low).
It’s important to engage in two specific practices when quoting – a needs analysis, and a market analysis. The needs analysis entails gathering every bit of relevant information pertaining to the project and what the client requires, and the market analysis involves assessing the current web market for the type of project, as well as your level of skill and experience (and that of your team members if applicable).
Check out the resources section for more resources on this subtopic.
Minimizing Expenses
Using Web Tools
There are literally hundreds of web apps, online tools, and open source downloads that can assist you in time management, invoicing, document templates, process mapping, and all sorts of tasks that occur throughout the design and development process as well as overall finances. Pick a few of these, but not all of them, and work them into your business model.
Pen and paper, or sporadic spreadsheets and documents, can only take you so far before they begin wasting your time rather than saving it. I find web tools particularly useful for time tracking, project management, invoicing, and streamlining communications.
Streamline Your Process
Be sure to develop a process or work flow to save time and prevent yourself from re-inventing the wheel with every project. There are some great web design process guides in the resources section – check them out! Other streamlining