December is the busiest month of the year for me. It’s also the month when the winter blues and my biggest admin deadline of the year kicks in – not exactly my favourite part of being self-employed. Not all of you will be sorting out their incoming and outgoing invoices this month; many of you will instead dive into your books four times a year. But whether you sort out all things admin once or four times a year, whether you handle everything yourself or work with an accountant, and whether you enter all your data into an Excel sheet or work with an app – no freelancer can escape the admin side of being self-employed.
The first few years I was a freelancer, I made the classic mistake of leaving all things admin until the last moment. This left me in a time crunch, made me forget to deduct expenses I made 11 months earlier and other sloppy mistakes. One time, I managed to delete an entire row from my Excel file, while also giving half my incoming invoices the wrong number. My excellent accountant noticed this – an an excellent accountant would – and wasn’t impressed by my hasty sloppiness, which ended up costing me more time. 😬
I have tried to take better and speedier care of my admin since then. Below are my top tips so you can also streamline your admin process and make it just a little bit more fun.
Build a moment around it ☕
I’m ashamed to admit this, but I’m not above using the kinds of tactics that parents rely on to get their children to clean their rooms to prod myself into doing admin. I put on a nice podcast, pour myself a nice coffee and get the Christmas cookies from the cupboard. I hope that over time I’ll come to see doing admin as a sort of freelance Christmas party that I’ll start to … look forward to every year?
Create a checklist with your regular expenses
Ideally, you wouldn’t let your admin build up, but instead send out invoices every month and input your expenses at the same time. To ensure that I don’t forget to deduct any expenses at the end of the year, I’ve created a checklist of recurring expenses. Think: banking expenses, accounting expenses, social security payments, phone and internet expenses, software expenses and work-related subscriptions … By putting them all in a checklist, you’ll save yourself a lot of work next year.
Are there any last-minute things you can do for your finances? 💸
In the process of taking care of my admin, I realised that my pension circumstances as a self-employed person don’t look great (I’ll tell you more about that in a later newsletter). So, I signed up to a pension savings plan right before the end of the year, which will lower my tax bill this year. I also discovered a few invoices for services that were not business expenses but that could save me money in another way. It turned out, for instance, that my health insurer reimburses part of my gym membership fee. In short, your end-of-year admin session is a good time to review all your expenses, with or without your accountant.
Be proud of what you accomplished this year 💪
Your invoices are like a sort of diary recapping your freelance year. Use this diary to pause and reflect on all the projects you completed in the preceding 12 months. Beacuse if you’re anything like me, you probably had little time for this during the year. If you love lists as much I do, you could even create a list of the kinds of assignments you enjoyed doing the most in 2022 and brainstorm how you might be able to do more of this work in 2023. Kinda useful, this sort of admin session, right?
That’s it from me – but be sure to email us your admin tips and rituals at freelancerthefriendly@gmail.com
Speak soon,
Selma
Responses from our readers to ‘Freelancing as a form of resistance’:
“I had to laugh when I read this newsletter. When a client underpaid me a few years ago, I thought I was well within my right to steal a cute mug from the communal kitchen on my last day working onsite. I still use it to this day :)” - Anonymous reader
Reader Anthony wrote an article (in Dutch) about quiet quitters, though he prefers to call them “doing-enoughers”.
Robert Vlach, who’s written a book about freelancing, sent us a handy, country-by-country list detailing useful sources for Europe-based freelancers. Yours truly also feature in it 😊