Freelancers Rejoice, Comprehensive Time Tracking is Here At Last!
Working as a freelancer certainly has its fair share of benefits. Your hours are typically more flexible, you can often work from the convenience of your own home in your pajamas, and you can take on as much or as little work as is feasible for your current budget and time allotment. However, freelancers know that this also means a whole different set of challenges than a traditional 9-5 job.
We all have the chill, super-easy client that likes the work we do, rarely asks for revisions and cuts a prompt check at the end of each month. However, we ALL have that other type of client: consistent phone calls and 10-paragraph e-mails that they don’t believe should be counted as billable hours, wants us to document every single second we spend on their account to prove our worth, and asking us to provide in-depth reporting on the work we’ve done every week.
While this type of client can be frustrating, at the end of the day they are still our client and we still need to provide them with the reporting that meets their company’s needs. This is one of the reasons that more and more freelancers are seeking out digital platforms that track time spend with each client. However, many time tracking solutions often have gaps. For example, just because you sit with Photoshop open for three hours, doesn’t mean you aren’t watching The Price is Right re-runs on your phone. These platforms centralized around tracking time are also incredibly beneficial for us who have junior employees, interns or ones who sub-contract out parts of a client scope to others. You are able to easily monitor just how much time someone else is working on a client project, ensuring that you are not getting over-billed, or worse, that you aren’t accidentally over-billing a client who trusts you to be transparent about time spent working for them.
The good news is that the software gods of the digital age have blessed freelancers with a cornucopia of platforms that help them succeed. For example, when running the 300 meter hurdles with a client regarding your true billable hours, time tracking platforms such as Meritrick can help you prove exactly how long you spend on each client’s project in real time. This means no more back-and-forth with clients, you will now be able to simply show them tangible proof of time spent on a project via Meritrick. It also means no wasting time with painstaking manual entry of every task, the length of every call, and no more spending all day on a Saturday breaking sorting through old post-it notes that serve as your log of hours spent on a client, simply because the last day of the month happens to fall on a Saturday. You can now provide exactly how much work you put in, without lifting a finger!
The platform even works when you aren’t online, meaning just because Panera cut off your WiFi after an hour, doesn’t mean that every single task you accomplish isn’t being logged. It also means that when you take a vacation to stay in a yurt in Baja, any work you do is still able to be proved as billable time. As soon as you re-connect to the internet, every task will sync immediately back to your Meritrick account. Hey, maybe you can just move to Baja for a month!
Get on the path to no more excel spreadsheets or hand-written notes to track your time and sign up today!