2024: the year I finally spent some money on my business

I’m not going to mislead you here. This blog is about a time/efficiency struggle I had, which I solved by investing in a project management tool. There’s an affiliate link at the end, and I’ll earn commission if you purchase anything through the link.

My starting strategy when going freelance was to only invest in the basics. Computer, software licences, CAT tool, professional indemnity insurance and professional membership subscriptions. I say the basics, but that’s a fairly big chunk of money to start with. From there on, I tightened up the purse strings and focussed on at least making my money back.

Fast forward two years, when it comes to business expenditures I’m still, for lack of a better word, tight. I avoid spending money unless I really have to.

But in actual fact, I think I’ve been losing money in other ways.

• Investing time into projects and services that aren’t necessarily viable.
• Making life difficult for myself when it comes to professional admin.

Pinching pennies was a good strategy in the beginning. But I’ve reached the point where I can save more money by spending my time doing paid work or marketing my services, rather than wrestling with my slightly shabby homemade systems and processes every month.

In November, a client asked me to generate an invoice for them using their CRM system (one that I’m unfamiliar with). Cue the initial panic about showing my true, technically incompetent colours.

Turns out, it was incredibly simple.

The next day, was my invoicing day. A day which should be a happy occasion. For me it wasn’t. Here’s how it usually goes:

• First, I spend ages grappling with my timesheet, chuntering to myself about all the other fun things I could be doing with my time instead.
• Then, I have a quick comb through my emails to check I haven’t missed anything. I remember that I got a new client this month, and they aren’t yet featured in the spreadsheet of doom.
• I check and check and check to make sure I’ve typed my invoices out properly and not made a mistake somewhere.

And before I know it, it’s taken me well over an hour to issue 10 invoices.

I am a project manager, but I wasn’t being efficient at project managing my own affairs. To be completely honest, after a hard day’s work organising other people, it’s the last thing I wanted to think of. But I made a resolution to do better. I’m not technically incompetent, I’m just lacking in time.

A few days before Christmas, I was itching to get everything done, get all the invoices out, and start getting into the festive spirit. The Bailey’s was practically whispering to me through the ceiling. So I giddily signed up for a free trial of LSP.expert (a project management tool for translators and small agencies) in order to speed things along. Amazingly, I managed to get them done in 15 minutes.

Side note: I’ve used this platform before when working with another client, albeit a while ago, so I was already a bit familiar with the software.

But that’s probably because the platform is very intuitive (it was created by fellow translators, who obviously understand what we need). I’ve ended my trial now, and purchased a year’s subscription because I liked it so much.

Here are my favourite parts:

• You can add in client details, including addresses, customer contacts, payment terms, and your rates for each one. This makes invoicing and adding jobs incredibly easy.
• There’s a time-tracking feature. It’ll be very handy to know what activities and clients make me the most money.
• It gives you reports. My data is quite limited at the moment, as I’ve only just started using it. But I can’t wait to see my performance, time, margin, and sales stats after a few months. Again, very handy in terms of strategy to know what’s going on. More generally as well, there are Turnover, Profit and Loss, and Tax Summary reports, which will hopefully make tax returns much easier.
• You can create quotes, then create a job from a quote, then an invoice based on a job. This takes out a lot of project management kerfuffle and I think it will also be great to have a list of pending, accepted and rejected quotes all in one place.
• Outsourcing is pretty easy. You can add suppliers and their details the same way you would add clients, labelling them according to their areas of expertise. You can also calculate your margins through this function, create purchase orders for your suppliers. As if that’s not enough, by creating an expense for every outsourced job you can keep track of money coming in and out.
• I briefly touched on this on the last bullet point, but labels. Oh how I love the labels. You can stick labels on Jobs and groups, Clients, Suppliers, Quotes, Invoices, Expenses, and POs. It’s so good. I’ve labelled all of my jobs according to the services I offer so that I can get a view on what’s hot and what’s not. But it’s really up to you how you decide to organise everything.

Things I’d like to try and do before the next month is up (holding myself accountable here):

• CAT tool configuration. So that I can import the analysis from my CAT tool into my jobs. Again, should be good for pricing.
• I want to create a professional-looking document template for my quotes and invoices. I managed to produce some nice ones during the trial period, but I think I can customise it further and make it look a bit more ‘me’.
• Integration with my emails and calendar. I especially can’t wait for the calendar part as I have multiple different email addresses for different clients, so if I add jobs in, they will hopefully show up in my ‘main’ calendar, and I won’t lose track of anything (as if I would 😉).

It’s user-friendly, but I do need to do a bit of work experimenting and finding out how best I can use it. I was getting frustrated when I was invoicing because the notes I’d added kept ending up in a weird position. I ended up deleting them and adding them back in manually in Adobe before I fired it off to my clients. I’m confident I could resolve that kind of thing if I took a bit more time to learn how to use it properly.

To be fair, I was also offered help via a 30-minute online chat to iron out any of these sorts of niggles. I haven’t done this yet, so I can’t complain. There’s a plethora of information available in the Help Centre, and I always take the time out to read the helpful and interesting blogs – very happy with the customer service so far.

If you think this tool might be worth giving a go, you can do a 30-day trial for free. I paid the full amount for my subscription, and this is not a paid ad. But LSP.expert do run an affiliate program.

If I’ve tempted you in any way, please have a look using this link: https://www.lsp.expert?ref=oQ4bf8E69

It won’t change anything on your end, but I will be able to earn commission on any converted users after the trial period who came from here.