CRM for freelancers: one person, no seat fee

The three lists every freelancer keeps badly

Putting them in one place is not about being organised for its own sake. It is so that the answer to "when did I last work for them and did they pay" takes four seconds rather than twenty minutes of scrolling through a bank app.

• Clients — usually in phone contacts, with no history attached
• The diary — usually a calendar with no link to who is paying
• Money owed — usually a mental note that wakes you at two in the morning

Quotes are not income until they are

Freelance revenue reporting goes wrong in a specific way: proposals that were never accepted end up counted in the month. Here a quote carries its own status, is excluded from order revenue and is reported separately — so the dashboard shows you both the real number and what it left out.

When a quote becomes work, changing the status is one tap and the dates fill themselves in.

Getting paid, in stages

A deposit now, the balance on delivery, is the standard freelance arrangement, and it is an instalment plan. Each instalment has a date and can raise a reminder, so the follow-up call happens on the day rather than three weeks later when it has become awkward.

When you take on a second person

Subcontracting or hiring is where most one-person tools stop being useful. The same app becomes a shared workspace with the manager paying for the seats — but only if you get there, and the single-user app never changes.