A guide to freelancers’ favorite management tools

As a freelancer, you know full well that every day is different. Between finding new clients, managing ongoing projects, and dealing with accounting and financial management, you have a zillion things to do and handle.

So, to avoid feeling overwhelmed, having a well-organized daily routine is essential. Many tools can help you manage every aspect of your daily work. Too many, perhaps. So how do you pick the right ones? To help you navigate, here’s a curated selection of the best tools for freelancers.

Once your activity is created, you’ll need to look for your first clients. One of the best ways to find work is by signing up to a freelancing platform. These platforms connect companies with independent professionals.

All you need to do is fill out your profile with all the essential information about your business (your field, specialty, experience, portfolio, and daily rate). Prospective companies can then directly contact you and offer you work. Some platforms will even handle sharing your profile with potential clients for you.

Our recommendations: among the many different players existing on the market, we especially recommend:

• Malt, one of the best known platforms, connects freelancers and companies (startups, SMEs, large companies…);
• Crème de la Crème, a French platform only open to experienced freelancers (the team carefully vets every sign-up);
• Comet, dedicated to IT and web development freelancers.

On the hunt for a more active way to prospect for clients? Use professional social media platforms to communicate with the companies you’re interested in, in your field.

The tool we recommend: LinkedIn, the largest professional network in the world. With over 850 million registered users and 58 million registered companies in 2022, it’s the essential website to grow your network and get in touch with prospective clients. Provided, of course, you understand its codes and how to personalize your client search. Here are our top tips for finding new freelance assignments on the blog.

As a freelancer, you want to continuously learn to grow your skillset and stay up to date with your field’s trends. Taking online courses, attending conferences, reading content on your specialty…all these methods are great for maturing your expertise.

Our favorite tools:

• LinkedIn Learning offers video courses to help you grow both your hard skills (technical skills such as SEO, marketing, or using software) and your soft skills (people and behavioral skills, such as speaking in front of an audience, communicating, storytelling, learning to master your emotions…).
• Hubspot Academy gives you access to a large offer of online courses on various topics. Some of these courses are free.
• LiveMentor provides online training to help entrepreneurs and freelancers create and develop their businesses. Their learners can also choose to be coached by a mentor.

As a freelancer, you know how important it is to be available and able to react quickly to your client’s requests. Communication is key to any good business relationship.

Depending on your needs, several types of tools should come in handy.

• An emailing service

Emails are the easiest way to send a business proposal and the other documents needed to complete your work (your contract, quotes, invoices…). We think you’ll like: Gmail’s online business messaging service, which is part of Google Workspace.

• A videoconferencing tool

You’ll need to plan meetings with your client as part of your missions. These are often essential to better understand their needs and map out new projects. If you’re used to working remotely, calls or videoconferences are your best option.

We recommend the videoconferencing tools Zoom and Google Meet, which is also part of Google Workspace.

• An instant messaging service

Need to get information on something? Have a specific question about a job you need to do? Instant messaging is an excellent alternative to emails, especially if you need to go back and forth with your clients regularly. The perk to these services? Quicker answers and a boost in your productivity.

The recommended tool: Slack, the instant communication tool we use internally at Qonto.

• Collaborative tools

You may need to collaborate with your client proactively on some missions. Using a collaborative tool adapted to your work is then preferable to avoid multiple back-and-forths and email exchanges. That way, the company you’re working with will be able to comment directly and suggest modifications on your work documents.

Our favorite tools: to each field, their collaborative tool. For instance, Google Docs (another application part of the Google WorkSpace suite) is a good option for working collaboratively on written content (such as writing articles or devising a strategy). Figma, on the other hand, is particularly well-suited to graphic design collaborations.

As a freelancer, odds are you have to juggle between several projects and different clients. It’s therefore essential to organize yourself well, so you can plan your daily work and meet your deadlines.

The tools we recommend: Google Calendar (also part of Google Workspace) will help you organize your schedule and plan meetings. Trello is a wonderful productivity tool offering Kanban boards to track projects easily and see how you’re progressing. Rather have an all-in-one solution? Notion allows you to have a single workspace to manage your projects, take notes and build a complete database. That’s not all. You can also use it to create calendars and schedule reminders. It’s an essential tool we use internally at Qonto.

Whether you’re billing per project or a daily rate, it’s essential to know how to manage your time.

Our favorite tool: Toggl Track will help you calculate the time you spend on each mission. That’ll give you a better idea of the amount of work you spend on a project and help you adjust your following quotes accordingly.

As a freelancer, you’ll also spend part of your day financially managing your business and doing accounting. So here are the essential tools to manage your daily work and spend less time on administrative tasks.

A business account is mandatory for freelancers who earn at least an income of €10,000 over the span of two consecutive years. It allows you to keep your personal expenses separate from your professional ones. All you need is to find the right business account.

The tool we recommend: Qonto, the fully online business account which energizes freelancers. Open an account in 10 minutes and get access to all the payment methods your business might need (Business Mastercard cards, SEPA, and SWIFT bank transfers…).

Qonto also brings you:

• built-in invoicing;
• features designed to simplify bookkeeping and manage your professional expenses;
• customer support available 7 days a week (and even 24/7 in France) by phone, chat, or email.Less time on admin. More time to focus on what really matters: your clients and projects.

Your business is growing, and you have now become a sole proprietorship (EURL or SASU, for example). As a result, your accounting and administrative obligations have become more complex. To save time, we recommend enlisting the help of a professional service and using the right accounting management tools.

The services we recommend:

With Dougs, you can benefit from a fully online accounting service dedicated to your company, which prides itself on being super reactive. They’ll handle all your mandatory declarations (such as balance sheets, tax returns, VAT declarations…). Already a Qonto customer? You can sync your account directly to Dougs. That way, all your transactions are shared automatically.

You can also explore Acasi or Compta Clémentine, two online accounting services for freelancers and independent contractors.

As a freelancer, it’s a great idea to have a website where you can showcase:

• your services and your specialty;
• your background and experiences;
• your portfolio (a way to display your best projects and works).

Don’t worry: savvy coding skills are no longer required to create a website. No need either to dedicate a considerable budget to this endeavor. There are now simple, affordable, and quick methods to build your online presence.

The services we recommend: WordPress is one of the best-known website creation platforms. It allows you to create a website fully customized to your company’s image. You can also give services like Wix or Squarespace a try. They provide fewer customization options but are very beginner-friendly. All these services offer the possibility of adding a blog or a contact page to your website.

Some freelancers don’t hesitate to create an entire media presence around their business. They are active communicators, whether it’s through blog articles, LinkedIn posts or newsletters. They don’t just talk about their services; they also share relevant content they know will interest or educate their prospects. The idea behind this is to build their reputation and to position themselves as experts in their field. They build an online audience and grow their personal brand.

Our recommendations: As mentioned previously, LinkedIn is the most popular platform to promote your business and grow your professional network. If you’d like to go even further and build an audience through a newsletter, specialized services like Mailchimp or Mailerlite are excellent choices.

Freelancer and looking for a professional account that suits your needs? Discover Qonto, the account that energizes freelancers.