Being a talented designer, developer, writer (or whatever kind of professional you are) is not the only factor in being a successful freelancer.
To work remotely takes huge organizational skill, administration skills and the ability to communicate long-distance with a team of people who could be in different time zones and from divergent backgrounds.
Fortunately, we live in an era where there are multiple free tools, apps and sites which are designed with the express purpose of making your life as a freelancer easier.
While there are a lot of apps to choose between, the following are the essential freelancing apps that you simply must install if you want to work remotely.
5 Must have Freelancing Apps
Zervant
You do it for the love, but when it comes to your clients let’s face it, it’s all about the money. Zervant is an invoicing template which allows you to send unlimited quotes, estimates and invoices. It also allows you to add your client base and products to your profile to make life easier when you’re managing projects and keeping an eye on finances.
Zervant helps you keep track of who’s paid and who hasn’t. Best of all it allows you to export your financial data directly to your accountant come tax season.
Toggl
Working doing what you love means you’ll hopefully have the time of your life. Keeping track of time is essential for every freelancer. Most freelancers charge based on time. If you’re just starting out you need to figure out how long tasks take you so that you can quote accurately.
Time tracking is essential for anyone running a professional service. It keeps you accountable and lets you show your customers just how long you’ve spent on each of their projects. Toggl is a fantastic time management tool that lets you track your time by client and by project on its free model. If you want to find out what else it can do the paid version is only $7.20 per month.
Slack
Good communication is essential for working with a remote team. Slack is an app that not only lets you have a dedicated space to talk with the people you’re collaborating with, but also allows you to see when they’re online, and lets you create dedicated team task chat zones to ensure that information is shared with the people who need it when they need it.
You can also search your threads for shared files and keywords when you need to backtrack.
Trello
So, you’ve got your time, communications and finances all straightened out. Now you need to get down to the work itself. Trello is an app that helps you keep track of your tasks by creating cards for each one and moving them between your process boards as needed.
You can make boards, lists and individual cards to prioritize your projects and checklists. You can also attach files and tag your team members to tasks as you go along. They will be notified of any changes that you make on the card via e-mail, to keep you all on the same page.
Google Drive
Google Drive is a fantastic free tool that’ probably already connected to your E-mail account. Google drive is useful as a place to store smaller files and share them with your team. The real appeal of the Google Drive suite, though, is that when you create and share Google Docs and Google sheets with your team, you remove the issue of mixed up “final” version control.
You can decide if you want to give them access to view only, comment or edit. You can also see who edited what, and when. You automatically get 15Gb of storage space with your free Gmail account, or you can choose to buy additional storage space if you want to.
