4 services I happily pay for that make my freelance life easier
Quickbooks Self-Employed
Quickbooks Self-Employed is a fantastic service that helps me track my business and personal expenses. In my mind, Quickbooks was always notoriously expensive, and not a great option for expense tracking on a freelance budget. I used to export my monthly expenses, drop them in a spreadsheet, format them, and then spend time categorizing them. It was a lot of work. But then Quickbooks released Self-Employed, which is essentially a lite version for only about $10 per month. Self-Employed has all the tools you need to keep track of expenses, and none that you don’t. I can quickly create invoices, categorize expenses, and track my business milage with an intuitive swipe interface. It pulls data from my linked debit and credit accounts, so I don’t even log in to those clunky apps anymore. All the information I need is aggregated inside of Self-Employed.
CPA Services
In my first year as a freelancer, I was flat broke, so I knew I had to do my taxes myself. After being drawn in by TurboTax’s “free” software, and spending hours trying to decipher what was a personal expense and what was a write-off, they got me. TurboTax isn’t free if you’re filing as self-employed. So after doing all that work, and feeling really nervous about it, I still had to pay around $150 to file. Luckily, the next year, I did some marketing work for a CPA, and then decided to hire him to file my tax returns. It was a great choice. He helped me spot potential write-offs that I didn’t know about, answered all my questions, and gave me tips on how to save more the next year. Now, I always have him help me. I had to pay a little bit to TurboTax anyway, and the peace of mind I got was worth the extra $100 or so my CPA charged.
Pixelcut
Pixelcut helps me make all the custom art for my blog in just minutes. Pixelcut main feature is that it can cut out objects and create transparent backgrounds in seconds. It honestly takes less time for me to find and image and cut it out than it does to launch Photoshop. From there, I’ll add interesting shapes, text, and backgrounds to my art to complete the picture. Pixelcut costs $10 per month, and it gives me amazing art in minutes. I wrote a piece about how this has helped me see productivity in a different way recently. Check it out here.
Squarespace
Squarespace just gets better and better as the years go on, which is why I’m increasingly happy to be a customer. I started making Squarespace sites at my first ad agency internship at Conscious Minds, when I created a dedicated vendor intake website. Since then, all of my personal websites have been created on Squarespace, and most of my clients websites have been too. A few times, clients have pushed me to create websites for them on Wix, Clickfunnels, Shopify, and Wordpress, but none of them are as intuitive and powerful as Squarespace. Shopify and Wordpress are more powerful sure, but good luck if you don’t have a coding background. Wix might be a little easier, but the features aren’t as reliable or powerful as Squarespace. Recently, I created a full marketing tech stack for a client selling an online course using only Squarespace. We created the landing page, captured emails, sent email campaigns, and hosted the course on Squarespace with their new Member Areas. This made the process so much easier since we didn’t have to switch between multiple software interfaces, and integrate them all. It also created a fully branded experience, as every bit of content, and every inch of traffic was completely on his website.
