Smashing eBook_ Professional Workflow for Web Designers - Luke Reimer [18]
Getting Personal
High Level Perspective on Your Income
Freelance income is often seriously sporadic, especially if it’s a part time side gig as with most web designers. You do some work in what feels like your spare time, and you receive almost random influxes of cash as projects close or you move through payment schedules.
This style and type of income generation can be difficult to wrap your head around in comparison to a steady salary and a standard pay day once every few weeks that you’d receive from a full-time corporation. It’s important to step back and understand how much you’re actually earning, especially in comparison to the overall time you put into each project.
Personal Budgeting
Personal budgets are always a pain, unless you’re the hyper-organized type. However, using the figures gleaned from financial estimates and calculations based on web projects can play a major role in organizing yourself economically.
Instead of “oh, and I’ll probably make a couple grand here and there from web projects”, it should ideally be, “last year my net income from web design was roughly $XXXXX, so I can factor this into my overall expenses and income.”
Taxes
This is also a localized issue depending on what country you design out of, but it’s a generally important piece of the puzzle to keep in mind throughout the entire year. All of your record keeping and tight organization will contribute to a much more stress-free tax filing season than a mad scramble to dig up receipts and old sent emails.
Be sure to investigate the protocols and limits for what you can expense to your business, as well as any other regulations. Web design income can be tempting to keep off of the books in certain situations, but in the long term it is rarely in your favor. You’re much better off developing strong small business accounting practices and financial discipline to aid you in future work.
Financial Planning
Linking to the discussion of understanding your web design income from a high level, financial planning on a longer term scale is also important. When analyzing your personal income plan and having a birds-eye-view financial outlook, it’s important to consider retirement planning as well as debt pay-down plans. Use the records you’ve begun to keep and your financial data from web income to assist these personal financial plans. The previously mentioned discussion with a banker can also be a good time to bring up these concepts.
Conclusion
It all comes down to spending the right time and effort to keep track, save the information, and then use it when necessary to accomplish tasks and administration at high efficiency. Estimation is a concept employed a great deal by web designers, and striving to make these estimations accurate should be a very high priority. With this information you can reach ideal revenue from projects, minimize your expenses with each new venture, and organize yourself financially for discipline and freedom from stress.
APPENDIX: Sample Legal Document
The following sample legal documents have been carefully prepared to serve as examples for you to use. These examples will be provided along with descriptions and explanations of their purpose and best use. Each document is freely available for anyone to use or modify without copyright or license restriction.
Note: All templates are available as .doc-templates in the folder Templates of the Smashing Bundle.
Web Design Client Questionnaire
Purpose:
The purpose of this questionnaire is to gather specific information about a potential web project in order to accurately ascertain the scope, requirements, and how to best meet the client’s needs. Please be as thorough as possible and feel free