It has been just over a week since I set off as a freelance developer. So far so good. It is also time to start billing clients! My first step, though, was a quick meeting with my accountant/tax guy. I have an LLC for the business and got some pretty good advice right away for how to track my expenses, understand revenue, pay myself, etc. He recommended getting some sort of software that he could then log into to view. This would be useful for our quarterly meetings, and for tax time.

I did some research and picked FreshBooks as my online billing tool. (affiliate link) There were a number of favorable website mentions of it and a number of my peers on twitter also recommended it. I have to say I am rather impressed. I picked the free package, but will likely need to upgrade at some point. The monthly fee is low enough I don't even need to think about it.

Right off the bat I easily added a couple client accounts, gave them login access to review their own account status. Made some projects and was able to start adding timesheet information right away. The interface is clean and simple, and there are a number of options to change the look and feel to match my own branding. Right now I really don't have a brand so I kept the nice clean look it already had.

Timesheets, how I loathe timesheets! Truth be told, it really isn't very bad with this tool. I am not sure how well it would work if you had say, 300 clients/projects to manage. But I don't ever expect to do that. The interface is clean and easy, and the summary tools are ready to know where you are on a given project hourly total, how many hours you have billed today, this month, etc.

One set of features I really appreciated are the invoicing options. I have some clients whom I need to invoice on a recurring basis a fixed amount. That was incredibly easy. I can see the status of the invoice, if the client is objecting, has marked it paid, or has even viewed it. Clients can log in, view the invoice, the time sheets for each project, etc and post their questions/thoughts. Other clients have fixed price projects of x number of hours, others still I bill at my standard rate, and one I have negotiated a special hourly rate. Every single example here was very easy to set up. I have only sent out my invoices via email, but there were options to save as PDF, snail mail, or even have them pay online via PayPal, Authorize.net, Google Checkout and a number of others. I would rather get checks as my invoices are larger, and I don't want to pay the % for cc processing. I can see why the online processing would be handy for others though.

I also started recording all my expenses. This will probably be the most tricky for me, as I am not all that great with paperwork. So far I just set up a different bank account, put ALL business expenses on that account, and save everything related to a receipt in a binder for review later. My accountant has informed me that tracking expenses is critical, due to how us freelancers are taxed. FreshBooks has a system to track generic expenses vs project specific expenses, which will come in handy for the times when I need to travel.

I have also looked into inDinero for my general business money management tool. It has an integration feature with FreshBooks, which is very handy. inDinero also connects directly with PayPal, and many banks, which helps reconcile records. You can then send your accountant their own login and presto! It still isn't clear to me if I need it though, as Freshbooks does so much of what I need. It may not matter though as I use a smaller local bank (which I love) and they do not sync with InDinero quite yet.

So far what I thought that this whole billing/time tracking/paperwork trail process would be the worst part of being a freelancer, however it has been super easy. Hopefully there are no surprises down the road.

My projects thus far have been simple ColdFusion programming/support. I am chatting with a few people about more interesting work, where I would get to delve into new aspects of CF 9, HTML5 and Flash/AIR. I hope to set aside more free time after RIAUnleashed to work on Adobe AIR development for Google TV. Speaking of which, I got a Google TV. I plan to make a blog post about it in the next few days.