Five Essential Tools Every Freelancer Needs

If you join a startup or a corporate job, you'll most likely be given a laptop, one that is pre-loaded with all the tools you need for the job. But when you are into freelancing, you have to figure out that how you would do scheduling, time management, invoicing and lots of other tasks without HR executives or accountants to help you.

It can be daunting to manage all these different functions, and trying to do this the old fashioned way - by making copious notes on paper/ using Excel or Word - isn't going to help. There are a lot of really useful tools that you can try out though, which make life easier. Here's what you need.

1) Trello
The first thing you need to do is manage your different tasks. Some people call Trello a to-do list app, but it is actually a very powerful organiser. Sign up (it's free) and you get different boards on the main screen.

You can consider each board as a project, and add collaborators or team members (if any). Each board has cards, and you can have multiple columns of cards. Each card in turn can have files, pictures, or comments attached, along with deadlines and labels. So you could create a board to track projects, and add cards for the different tasks, complete with a checklist that includes reminders for things like invoice submission.

On your computer, Trello has a bunch of keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate through the app. If you know how to code it also has APIs to integrate your stuff directly.

Trello: Web, iOS, and Android.

2) Focus Booster
If the job you've taken on includes billable hours, then you need to track how much time is spent doing the related tasks. Giving a rough estimate isn't very helpful, and that's why Focus Booster is useful. It's a simple time tracking app, that also uses the Pomodoro method to encourage you to take breaks, and get your work done more effectively.

Focus Booster helps you to break down your time in 25-minute work sessions, and 5-minute breaks (you can tweak this in the settings) and the time tracked is labelled by the activity you were working on, and by the client you're working for, so you can manage multiple freelance projects easily, and focus on your work instead of keeping time logs.

It's free to use, for 20 sessions per month. You can also sign up as an individual, and pay $32.89 per year (approximately Rs. 2,100), which allows you to save 200 sessions per month. This gives you the session timer, time logs, reports, and data export to other formats.

Focus Booster: Web.

3) MailChimp
If you're a freelancer, then promoting your work and showing it to people is essential to help with exposure, and get new clients. For that purpose, MailChimp is a great tool to have, as it helps you to create newsletters, surveys, or just messages to send to subscribers.

MailChimp has a bunch of easy-to-use templates where you can have placeholders for pictures, videos, social buttons and what not. It also offers integrations with tonnes of other services. For instance, you can send a gift to your users with Shopify integration, and the Salesforce integration helps you manage your logistics from anywhere. MailChip also has great marketing and analytical tools.

If you have under 2,000 subscribers (which is likely the case for most freelancers) then you can send up to 12,000 emails per month absolutely free, though some features such as delivery by time zone, or chat support, are paid and require a $10 (approximately Rs. 650) per month commitment.

MailChimp: Web, and there are various MailChimp apps for different features as well - there are different apps for signup forms, texts, photo based campaigns, and more, for both Android and iOS.

4) Bonsai
As a freelancer, you not only have to do the work you were hired to do, but also file a lot of paperwork around it. That's not so bad when the company can provide all the templates that you just fill up, but at other times, you'll have to create contracts as well.

That's particularly the case if you're tying up with someone to do a long term project, or multiple assignments clubbed into one. But creating the contract is a daunting task for anyone. Try Bonsai though - it is a tool developed by freelancers, so they also know the pain people go through while creating work contracts.

You can choose a type of contract, add or remove clauses easily, sign it digitally online and you're ready to go. In a new beta feature, Bonsai is allowing customers to integrate their payments in contracts too. It's completely free, but the contracts are currently for the US, Canada, and the UK.

Bonsai: Web.

5) FreshBooks
Planning and tracking projects is one part of being a freelancer, and the next step is actually doing the work. After that, you still have the problem of sending and tracking expenses and invoices and the more projects you have to handle, the worse this problem gets.

FreshBooks is a cloud accounting software which handles your invoicing to time tracking to expense capturing. You can create invoices easily with FreshBooks, and can also use the mobile apps for remote management. FreshBooks also has integrations such as MailChimp and PayPal, which can be useful in a number of ways.

It supports time tracking, expenses, invoices, and payments, so FreshBooks can handle pretty much everything you need, and mobile apps allow you to send invoices on the go. FreshBooks is free for the first month, after which you've got to pay $9.95 a month (approximately Rs. 650) for unlimited invoices to up to five clients, or $19.95 (approximately Rs. 1,300) for 25 clients. At $29.95 (approximately Rs. 2,000) you can send unlimited invoices to an unlimited number of clients.

FreshBooks Web, iOS, and Android

Bonus
Apart from these five apps which we thought were must haves, there are a few others that we've found useful over the years. For one, there's Writeroom for Mac, a full-screen distraction free writing tool. Windows users can try out Darkroom instead. Cushion is an app to estimate project timelines, when you get new assignments, and if you need to sign invoices and contracts then SignEasy is a better option than downloading, printing, signing, and scanning documents.

What tools do you use for your projects? Tell us via the comments.