We’ve given some advice for setting freelance hourly rates before, including a rough rule of thumb for those leaving more traditional employment (multiple your hourly pay as an employee by 2.5 to 3.0). But a new blog post from Pat Allan offers another way to think about this, and one worth running through if you’re new to freelancing.
There are basically three variables to juggle: your total income for the year, the number of hours you’re going to work, and your hourly rate. If you know what any two of them are, you can figure out the third. So, if the goal is to come up with an hourly rate, you need to determine your target total income and work hours.
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There are a multitude of invoicing options available for the web worker, and we have covered our share of them. A new entry that just crossed my desk is the oddly named CurdBee.
I gave CurdBee a quick run through and found that it covers the basics of invoicing and payment reasonably well. I was able to get up and running quickly and found it easy to get test clients and service items entered for my first invoices. It hooks into Paypal Standard and Google Checkout for payment processing and also supports multiple currencies.
Be aware that there are no time tracking features and the overall functionality is sparse compared to more fully featured services like FreshBooks or Cashboard. It is also missing a lot of the nice “usability touches” that a more established product will typically have.
But if your needs are simple and you just need to send out quick invoices to your clients, CurdBee might be a good option for you. Accounts are currently free with no apparent limitations.
Are you using an online service for your billing? Could CurdBee work for you?
