I've been working as a freelancer practically my whole life. Although I'm not a very finances-oriented person, I do like to keep track of my spending and income, do some basic forecasting, budgeting, to also plan my time and activities.
One thing I've noticed is that most apps are really not oriented for people who, like me, dont have very fixed/stable sources of income. One month I'm doing something, next month I have very little work, next month I may be working on 3 different projects, with different wages.
I miss a simple way to track this, and to somehow allow me to plan my future, minimizing working hours and maximizing life (4hr work week anyone? ;)) But so far I haven't been able to find a finance management app that responds to the needs of freelancers like me.
Being in IT and software dev, I'm begin to think I should probably scratch my own itch and develop something that really suits my needs. So I'd like to ask you two things
2 - If you are somehow like me, would you give 5min of your time so that I could get more feedback from other freelancers about what would be useful for them, and other tips and strategies you might use for yourself for your own finances?
thanks so much!
https://www.wisecashhq.com
I built it pretty much for what you describe: to plan my future (it computes your runway & "time wealth"), adjust working hours as needed, "make time" for other topics, negotiate based on data etc.
The goal is not to "track all expenses", but rather to make a reasonable forecast of your situation.
You will likely find those articles useful:
- https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/knowing-your-cash-runway-a-k...
- https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/case-study-how-to-increase-f...
- https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/recurring-revenue-matters-vi...
Hope this helps & let me know if you have further questions!
Btw, to the maker, something like $15 USD would be a no brainer purchase price for me personally. This price, roughly $25 USD, is something I'll have to think about, but may get. (That might make $25 USD the right price! This is just one data point)
Also, you may wish to consider setting your prices in USD instead of Euros, depending on where your customers are located for the most part. A lot of non-US business owners will nonetheless operate in USD. For example, I'm Canadian but the US is my largest market so all of my prices and most of my online expenses are in USD, I have a USD credit card, etc. Likewise, my developer lives in Asia, and takes all of his payments in USD.
If your customers are mostly European this probably isn't worth it, but it could gain you some extra sales through reduced friction in other markets.
------
I had subscribed several years back, but didn't have a need then, so I cancelled. Now, I've moved to a higher sales higher expense model and had large cashflow swings in the low season. Which is why I'm quite likely to do it at $25 USD now, when I didn't before: I'm aware of how horrible cashflow crunches are.
Does wise cash do multi currency actually?
I initially handled both USD & EUR for payment, and it turned out to be a pain to handle from the seller perspective, at least at the stage where I am.
I haven't necessarily seen a difference in sign-ups after removing USD, btw!
I will definitely revisit this for the next version, though (will move to Stripe Billing, which doesn't impose an extra price when you add more currencies).
WRT multi currency support, it's not the case: this is only supporting a single currency at the moment (the largest use case by far for current customers).
But again this is typically something that will be covered in a future version.
What would be a "good" price for you?
(asking because when I'll make a complete rewrite, I want to have various price ranges, including a lower starting price).
There is actually a lot more detail right under each of those sections (see the "learn more" link).
For some reason it's not underlined, so I guess I have to fix this!
Example link:
https://www.wisecashhq.com/help/setting-up-a-recurring-trans...
This is, by the way, and git-backed knowledge based & source is available here:
https://github.com/wisecash/wisecash-support
Good luck!
I use Buxfer at the moment, which has a simple paid plan at 4.99, and a more complete one at 9.99 (with advanced features). I think offering more than one plan is a good idea, to catch different users at different price points. Unless your price is low, but at 20$+, its a really high-entry point for me
Intuit is what, $50 a month? I don't see why this product doesn't capture a similar amount of value.
I'd be careful with a lot of these comments, because (generally speaking) HN users are very technically competent, but extremely tight fisted when it comes to money.
If you're a consultant who charges out $100 an hour for work, then having a tool that relieves your monetary stress for the equivalent of 15 mins work is a no brainer.
Why you'd cut your margins so heavily for an audience who will not value your work (if they won't pay $25, I'd bet you a pain in the ass they probably won't buy at $5, and if they do, they'll be extremely annoying and demanding).
Charge more, not less.
In some places, too low a price will send the wrong signal too.
It's probably easier to target a single large country, for many reasons!
https://www.gnucash.org/
GnuCash is, let’s be honest, crap. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it, it’s totally free, but it’s crap.
However, it forces you to learn how to do proper double-entry bookkeeping. You’ll get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right. You’ll Google stuff and be frustrated that you can’t find an answer. You’ll just learn, somehow. But then...
...one day something clicks. And that day, you realise why this system has been the way that accountants do things for literally half a millennium [0]. It’s extraordinary. It’s impossible to lose track of money. The benefits are far too many to explain here, but just trust me when I say that when you ‘get it’, it’s like a transcendental moment.
So how do I plan my future? I put in speculative transactions. I forward-plot my income based on work done, invoice payment dates, and known tax office obligations. I play with the future, what-if this, what-if that. This is all really manual, in this software that will undoubtedly frustrate you, but the control you have is unmatched by any smart online Web 2.0 software. It’s like being in the Matrix of your money.
So yeah. GnuCash. Shite, but amazing.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_syste...
Not that I'm using GnuCash or even consider it, heck, I'm not even freelancing. However, people like you, sharing knowledge, are what keeps the Internet alive ;).
The reason why I disliked GnuCash was the lack of an undo together with a frickly date entry.
I recommend reading up on https://plaintextaccounting.org/ for those who like double entry but with text files
I haven't found an existing tool to budget in beancount so you'd have to write it yourself. Other people have successfully used Ledger's virtual postings (which doesn't exist in beancount) for budgeting though[0]. It might be a way forward for you?
[0]: https://emacs.cafe/ledger/emacs/ynab/budgeting/2018/06/12/el...
Last time I checked, gnucash sucked in charts :p
Learning to use GnuCash also gives you a good basic knowledge of accountancy principles which are useful skills to have both professionally and in general.
Tried GnuCash few times - first time I failed because I didn't know how to work with double-entry accounting [3]. Second time failed because GnuCash isn't flexible with currencies (maybe things got better now).
All these tools has steep learning curve, but things pays back with extreme flexibility and longevity over time. Everything is a text, which means I can access it from everywhere (scripts, editors, phone). I'm keeping everything on git (invoices, payment details, project status, todo list), so every change is recorded and, most important, I'm not dependent on external company's product that can go bankrupt tomorrow.
As I'm doing business with customers from different parts of world, I'm trying to be flexible by accepting currencies whatever is suitable for them. This is nightmare for ordinary accounting tools and AFAIK only ledger-cli and derivatives are able to handle it properly (eg. cryptocurrency payments and transactions). Hell, I'm even using ledger-cli to track my car fuel consumption and expenses which shows level of flexibility (try that with GnuCash).
Emacs/org-mode is for everything else ;) Invoices, project planning, drawing charts, coding, calculating and preparing tax reports, forecasting (you'd be surprised how powerful Emacs calc [4] is).
[1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/
[2] https://orgmode.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_syste...
[4] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/calc.htm...
I learned a heck of a lot about our spending habits during that time though. Super useful and nice that I could look back on cumulative effects of things over time and mix and match the queries different ways to answer different questions.
One of the main things I learned is that cars are really expensive. I brought up the numbers one time to some co-workers and they all insisted they spent nothing near that on their cars, even though I lived closest to the office and had the oldest car in the group.
(My e-mail is in my profile.)
It pretty much works as expected, except for the fact that (at least on my emacs) tangling ledger blocks is much slower than other languages (18+ seconds for 151 blocks, vs <1 s for a comparable amount of elisp).
Updates with startups take too long and your nit-picky features to increase your productivity probably do not directly correlate with these payment software companies business goals. I prefer full control / or the possible option for extensibility. Most importantly, looking at the data, no matter [or my several failed experiments/finance tool investments past year] ... I would eventually go back to excel. You just don't get the mental massaging that you are the shit in the UI.
Anyways, if this sounds interesting, I hope it saves you some time. I spent way too much time wasting my determination to find the perfect tool that actually never existed in the first place.
Check it out: https://github.com/mitul45/expense-manager
There's a public API too, so you could probably build forecasting and more detailed reporting on top of it.
Initial setup of budget categories took me about an hour of reading docs and playing with the app. Historical transactions mostly aren’t available for import, so over the first 1-2 months of use you’ll fiddle with things as you get more data.
From there I found myself just reviewing the reports every so often as needed.
There is a learning curve though; you have to think of money differently and that's a process. However, YNAB has no-joke changed my life. I don't stress about money. I know where it is. It's the best thing I've ever done for myself and my future.
I spend my money daily, it makes sense I should spend some time PLANNING my money daily. Can't recommend it enough.
It was also discussed here last year at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884
Been using it for a few years now to track finances as a freelancer and I don't see a reason to switch. It works really well.
But I wrote my own Bash script to calculate invoice amounts. I run 1 command per month and it spits out the number of hours I worked for each client and then shows how much I should invoice them for.
Whenever I spend money, I record the transaction in the app and import my bank statements to reconcile once a month.
Not ideal for everyone, but works great for me. Aside from that, I like the ability to set goals for yearly expenses and making sure you are putting enough away. This is great for insurance, tax, etc. I use Xero for my official business accounts, and being able to look to the future is the single biggest thing missing.
and its haskell clone hledger: https://hledger.org/index.html
I use hledger - but I bellieve both would work.
For accounting, PaymoApp doesn't offer full accounting services. I just started using Snelstart [2] a by and for Dutch market developed accounting platform. The best part of this application, is the integration with my accountant, he can monitor my administration 24/7 and this saves me time and money.
[1] https://www.paymoapp.com/ [2] https://www.snelstart.nl/
In addition to tracking personal/business finances in GnuCash, I used the invoicing feature to track billable hours and notes for each chunk of time. I had a custom invoice format that generated PDFs without the notes, and then I used the notes as reminders of what to put in periodic work reports.
A drawback to GnuCash, though, is that you can spend a lot of time getting your accounts and transaction splits just right, and tracking every little transaction. One of the best things I did was to move to doing less categorization and itemization in GnuCash (e.g., unless an expense was was tax-relevant, it got moved to "Misc.", and paper-money expenses weren't even tracked, but reconciled monthly).
It has tags, bugdets, categories, multiple currencies, reports. Author is regularly publishing new versions and is very responsive.
[1]: https://firefly-iii.org/
I do have one minor gripe: I have my Wave linked with my Azlo bank account, and when I'm scanning and uploading a receipt Wave creates a separate transaction, in addition to the one from my bank feed. You have to go in and manually select both txns and click "Merge". Seems like a pretty big miss, but still very usable. Especially on my small scale.
The only issue with this approach is – adding expenses is pain. When I am shopping for something, opening Google Sheet (on phone) and adding an expense/income is too cumbersome. So I built a UI for it – https://github.com/mitul45/expense-manager.
I have been using it since last couple of years and have an idea of my monthly/weekly expenses.
Have you looked into Google Forms? I really wish it supported custom types like list of items from named ranges. A custom UI app (in Haskell/reflex!) is what I may end up writing too.
The free plan should be enough for planning and tracking project progress. It's limited to 3 invoices though, so you might need to buy a paid plan for advanced accounting features.
https://www.paymoapp.com/
It's bizarre that a programmer focused discussion board doesn't support code or quote formatting. And even worse, doesn't strip out formatting that breaks!?
https://github.com/frappe/accounting
https://frappe.io/accounting
Anyone willing to collaborate, please drop me a mail.
It has all the things you need, and the interface is pretty good.
I'm a bit concerned that it stores attachments (receipts, invoices, etc) as blobs in its SQLite database, but users on its forum [1] seem to keep large databases without any problem.
Since it's one SQLite file per business, it's also easy to automate file backups on my end.
[1] https://forum.manager.io/
I'm really tending to scratch my own itch and do something different. Cushion app comes close to what I what, but still misses a few spots and its a bit more expensive than what I'd like to afford.
Dealing with your finances (or anything else you deal with more than once) is a process. Figure out what your process needs to be and then automate the most painful parts with the tools you can find. Rinse and repeat as you locate more pain points.
You'll likely find that a general tool such as Excel is the best way to start. As you gain a further understanding of your problem, then you can trial other tools. As I mentioned above, the best app for you will likely be the one which best handles your greatest pain points.
Apps can still be helpful as a starting point for your processes. Apps have workflows which you can steal for your own workflows. You'll then likely tweak to the point where the tool is no longer a good fit.
The exception to the above is when your greatest pain point is some combination of time and collaboration. It may be best to pick among the leaders in the space and force yourself to adapt. I can track things in Excel, but I may be forced to pick something else if I need other people to use it.
The above is from someone who goes through loads of apps and always ends up going back to basic tools.
But then adding expense on Excel from mobile is real pain, so I wrote a frontend client for it. I've been using it for about 1.5 years now, works like a charm.
I have expense history of almost every cent I spent in last 1.5 years :)
Check it out: https://github.com/mitul45/expense-manager.
The best thing is that you have been using it for 1.5 years. The hardest part is making something stick. Even just entering stuff into a spreadsheet.
I like the way I can split up projects into multiple roles and track/bill differently for dev time vs admin work.
I also generate all my invoices through Harvest but I don’t use their builtin online payments.
There is a desktop tracker for MacOS and Windows and some open source Linux clients but I prefer to use a pinned tab in Firefox.
Now I use a database with my own application that handles table entries just like a spread sheet, has analysis, and charting, import/export of data.
Need income tracking, project time tracking whatever add a table(s).
It will read whatever schema you define and works with MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and others. If you want something a little extra then it supports plugins. Make your own. Videos, docs, and plugin tutorial see website. Its free open source.
My Expenses:
http://ajqvue.com https://github.com/danap/ajqvue http://dandymadeproductions.com/temp/GeneralExpenses.html
For analysis and filing taxes and stuff, I've written some custom analysis scripts that take the ledger file as input. Pretty easy to write, since the tool already gives you a large and reasonably well documented Python API.
[1] http://furius.ca/beancount/
[2] https://beancount.github.io/fava/
[3] https://github.com/nathangrigg/vim-beancount
Dave Ramsey is probably the biggest expert in helping people get out of debt and stay out of debt. While its a 8 step program, he requires you to sit down and budget.
Just one more accolade. He is known in circles as the best program to get people out of debt and fast.
Along with his program he offers an App called Every Dollar.
Its a must have if you know anything about budgeting personally.
1. Most banking apps segment spending, but they don't perform analysis in an actionable way.
2. Most banking apps allow you to automatically budget for goals, but they don't help you actually structure your budget; usually they relegate customers to siphoning money automatically, at best.
Solution
1. Create an app that not only performs both actions above, but also adds in a platform that caps/limits spending by category in order to reach monthly goals.
e.g. monthly rent is x. App suggests/limits spending on y + z.
e.g. planning for baby requires $x. App suggests/allocates n per week while limiting spending on y + z.
e.g. finances are unstable. App performs analysis of income patterns to determine safe threshold for discretionary spending or whether discretionary spending is even feasible.
Probably an app like this would need to have some sort of AI that not only leans on spending analysis algorithms but also can adapt to predictive behavior and set boundaries for the user.
(Does anything like this exist??)
IMO you need to know the ins and outs of bookkeeping anyway and Wave has been such a joy to work with. It has great apps for snapping photos => OCR receipts and sending invoices (if you require all your clients to pay invoices via Wave, accounting will be much easier).
The tracking and forecasting it provides are absolutely excellent. It absolutely lets you specify income, expenses, budgeting, existing and proposed projects, and since it lets you add estimated income for the future, you can get an excellent view of what your actual needs are in terms of future work and income.
For example, with my most up-to-date data I know that I'm booked solid with good income for the next two months, but for the rest of the year I need at least 1 project a month to meet my financial goals. I'm abstracting a bit, but it actually gives you hard numbers for where you're at and what you need in the future.
Feel free to toss me an email if you'd like to discuss this further. My email is in my profile.
For purchasing and receipt collection, I take a picture of the receipt with my phone, always on me, and put it in a folder.
ex. I have my current and future expenses in the system, I want to see what will happen to my cashflow given an extra $25 a month expenses for 6 months but also between $20 and $50 a month in revenue. I'd like to see some sort of best case/worst case report and maybe show the current "scenario" at the top with a toggle button to switch between scenarios or current projection.
Cool factor would be to lock in a scenario and later report on projected balances with and without scenario. ex. If I hadn't made that decision where would I be at.
this is more or less what I'd like to have, but with a little bit more of micro-management to be able to track income and plan work accordingly
For invoices, time-tracking etc., I use Freshbooks Cloud which is great.
For me it's important that:
- There's a website
- Multiple wallets in multiple currencies and conversion on as much as possible.
- Export/Import Data
The only one I found that I am satisfied with is Spendee[1]. It's not perfect, actually far from it. But It's got what I need, it's flexible enough and it seems to be getting enough updates.
[1] https://spendee.com
https://toshl.com
17hats.com
I really liked it and my wife uses still today for high end cakes and stuff she does. I’ve also gotten quite of few of my buddies that do trade jobs on the side (plumbing, electrical, low voltage, etc) to use it and they love it as well.
Probably more than what your asking, but it’s a great AIO platform. I particularly like the built in contract and digital signing abilities.
- It can do double-entry accounting and inter-account transfers.
- It can generate reports about your accounts and money flow, hence allows you to see trends and plan your finances.
It's very straightforward, hence very powerful, and allows me to track my finances very accurately and see my situation clearly.
If I would live in the US I would use Freshbooks (not so good for Europe if you need to handle VAT taxes in my opinion).
It's also good to speak with your accountant what to use (if you have an accountant).
Personally I use Google Spreadsheets but only because I only write invoices 1-2 times a month and I don't have ton of expenses.
In the UK, many FinTech startups have started launching current accounts targeted to freelancers and small businesses. Some examples:
https://getcoconut.com https://www.tide.co/
Obviously if you're in the US this won't work, but you haven't mentioned explicitly.
Use Accountgram if: 1. You do not want to install yet-another-app (other than Telegram) 2. Your workflow revolves around backing up receipts
Edit: although the app is marketed as finding deductions, we show spending breakdown by category and are in the process of adding automatic revenue tracking.
I can use Google Finance to pull in FX rates and I save my receipts to folders on the cloud.
http://track.tax for managing freelancer taxes
For tracking and putting aside money for freelance withholding, retirement and planned time-off.
Not a huge fan of mint, but I have about a decade of history in there. The UI is awful but every transaction continues to show up. So I export all to a spreadsheet every so often and manage everything in that sheet.
I've tried plenty of tools. Quicken, QuickBooks (online and offline), msn money when that was a thing, a few online services, etc. None of them got it right as far as I'm concerned.
Mint doesn't get it right either. And my spreadsheet isn't very good. But it gets the job done with very little hassle.
I’m not trying to stir the pot, but excel will do everything and more.
It will take a while, especially if you start out with emacs, but it is very rewarding. Some day I'll try ledger-mode and maybe up my level even further.
TLDR: Try Emacs/Orgmode with dynamic tables