Web Worker Daily

Invoicing application WorkingPoint is continuing to add to its offerings. Since we first reviewed the web-based application, the team behind it has been busy. The focus of the new features is simplifying tax season for small business — and as we’re all starting to think about what we need to do to close the books on 2009, these new features will come in handy. Read the rest of this entry »

“I’d rather keep working in the hope of getting paid than stop working and know I’m not going to get paid.” These words, from a friend of mine who’s not getting paid by the company she’s freelancing for — the only project she has right now — might shock you if you’re on a nice steady cashflow. But if your income isn’t so stable, you might be able to relate to her sense of desperation.

Though I know no one’s immune from a recession, this conversation made me think about my own approach to the financial side of what I do. I started to think about what, if anything, I could do to try to cushion myself from the current (and future) economic turmoil. Here’s what I came up with. Read the rest of this entry »

Expense reporting is always, in my experience, very painful. Filling out a poorly-formatted spreadsheet masquerading as an “expense claim form,” printing it out, stapling receipts to the form, realizing you’ve lost a crucial receipt, and then the inevitable back and forth before reimbursement. It’s a messy business, and something that we shouldn’t really have to do in 2009.

Expensify, a startup that aims to take the pain out of expense reporting, launches in public beta today. The free service streamlines the process of handling expenses and, thankfully, largely does away with paper receipts. It should prove useful to all kind of web workers, from freelancers to road warriors.

After the simple sign up, you’ll see that Expensify is a three-step service: import your expenses, scan your receipts, and generate expense reports.

Expensify homepage

Import expenses

The first step is importing your expenses. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no need to rehearse the latest round of bleak economic news once again. Now that it’s widely agreed that large parts of the world are in a recession, it’s time to focus our efforts on our core constituency: the web workers. Economic contraction is a mixed blessing for us. On the one hand, experience in working in an agile fashion, with the ability to draw on the worldwide internet for your clientele, is a big plus. But on the other, with traditional jobs vanishing for some people, there’s likely to be an influx of new web workers – leading to the potentially difficult scenario of too many web workers chasing too little work.

As a web worker who cares about your career, it’s just plain good sense to do what you can to make sure that your income survives increased competition. Fortunately, WWD has offered plenty of advice on that score over the years. Here are an even dozen of our best articles and tips for supercharging your career.

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Many web workers have a need to track expenses – either for client or employer reimbursement, or just to get their taxes right. And most of us have developed some solution for that – sticky notes, spreadsheets, notebooks, and so on.

Of course, like just about everything else, you can also track your expenses online. The latest service in this field is expens’d, a simple and free web application. The folks behind expens’d say they were trying to avoid simplicity, and they succeeded: you get instant signup and your own subdomain for free (additional users move you into paid plans), and a way to track name, note, date, and amount for expenses. You can also tag expenses (though I don’t see any tag search yet) and create reports, which can be sent by email to anyone – perhaps the best feature here.

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