“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs
For freelancers, this quote is indeed true as they do what they love at their own terms. They have the freedom to take up work they like and do it as per their convenience. At the same time, their lifestyle is quite dynamic as they handle various projects from different clients all at once.
For a freelance designer, it can get quite chaotic to work on several creative projects with unique guidelines and requirements. On top of that, you have to ensure you manage your artwork well without mixing any specifications as you may end up submitting the wrong work.
This can ruin your reputation and can adversely affect your revenue. To avoid this situation and to ensure you bill clients accurately, you need more structure in your work process. There are various tech tools available to help you organize your work and send invoices on time.
One of the most powerful tech tools that freelancers can make use of is a Project Management (PM) software. A PM software is a very resourceful tool for designers to effectively plan, organize and manage their design projects in order to deliver quality work and generate accurate client bills.
Let’s look at why a project management software is important for freelance designer:
1. Better organization of projects:
Design freelancers are creative artists who need the space and time to come up with clever and innovative designs for their clients. Since creativity cannot be forced, it sometimes leads to timelines getting delayed.
A project management software will help you quickly create projects from scratch even if they are complex and involve a lot of tasks. You can organize work better as you see every project’s current status on the dashboard to understand how much work is pending.
2. Easy reporting:
For design clients, you may want to verify progress often in order to ensure the project stays within the fixed budget. A project management software provides detailed reports to help you stay on top of everything and ensure successful completion.
You can easily customize these reports to share with the clients as well if they request for any details. This helps the client understand how much work has been accomplished and assures them that you are being productive.
3. Stay on schedule:
For freelancers, it is important to build a positive image by always delivering work by the pre-decided timeline. If you fail to do so, you may end up losing the client.
With a PM software, you can add a start and end date for every project to get alerts about deadlines. This ensures you schedule your work according to priority and delivery date instead of wasting your time on projects that aren’t urgent.
4. Bill clients accurately and on time:
As a design freelancer, you need to be diligent about sending invoices as soon as the work is over in order to ensure timely receipt of payments. PM software allows you to set up a billable amount for every project individually.
With the in-built time tracking tools, a PM software will show you how many hours were spent on a particular project. The software is very intuitive and quickly calculates the final amount based on the billable amount and generates an accurate invoice that can be shared digitally.
Conclusion:
If you are not using a PM software, chances are that you are spending unnecessary amounts of time on unimportant tasks. With the right software, you can get a lot more done in a day as it automates all the menial tasks and organizes your work well.
Content by SCORE
SCORE is a nonprofit association dedicated to helping small businesses get off the ground, grow and achieve their goals through education and mentorship.
