Greetings and Salutations! As you might have guessed by now you, as Voice Over Talent, are to a Business that is considered a Sole Proprietorship (except if you have partners which some of you do have) . That means you own your own business and in these financially shaky times you have to do things quickly and efficiently to stay afloat and even prosper.
The faster you are at:
- Replying to your clients.
- Sending Auditions
- Sending Quotations
- Doing Post Recording Preperation
- Recording the job
- Invoicing your client
…will put you and your level of professionalism at a level higher than that of the competition. Your efficiency (and work attitude) will keep clients coming back to you over and over because you make their life easier.
And you know Taji (thats me) wants to make your life easier and take care of you! So I am here to introduce you to an automated billing service called Freshbooks.com
Yes they’re based in Toronto and I’m Canadian and this might seem like nepotism (wait doesn’t nepotism mean that I favor those from my family?) …. but Toronto’s a big place baby! Its not like I know Bill Scott from down at the hardware store where you are living.
So back to freshbooks.com … this is how they described themselves:
“FreshBooks is an online invoicing, time tracking and expense tracking service designed to help entrepreneurs, freelancers and creative professionals save time, look more professional and get paid faster.”
Actually that’s just indicative of their generic service… this is what they believe:
We Believe:
Running a business is hard enough. We believe financial record keeping should be easy, fast, (and perhaps even fun), but still detailed enough to satisfy your accountant.
Billing should be simple. You can send an invoice a few seconds after creating your account no matter what level of experience you have.
Your data deserves to be safe, secure, and accessible to you. We also believe you own your data, we do not. Your data will be easy to export any time you want it.
Every customer should look like a Fortune 500 company, based on the image sent by invoices, bills, or other accounting communications, no matter what size the company is.
Everyone is entitled to the latest version of our software, so no matter what kind of account you have with us, you get the upgrades.
FreshBooks Manifesto
Our mission is to deliver fast and simple invoicing and time tracking services that help you manage your business. We call these Unaccounting™ services and they will:
- Save you time
- Be easy to use
- Make you look professional (think Fortune 500)
- Let you manage your books without an accountant
- Secure, encrypt, and back up your data
- Be available 24/7 from anywhere with any computer
So… a free service (its free if you only have 3 clients! … the more clients you want to track the more you’ll actually need to pay them to keep track of all your comings and goings) all you have to do is go to www.freshbooks.com and register.. you’ll get a company page and everything.
Incidentally they aren’t paying me to advertise them here… I know how hard it is to keep track of all your projects and bill people on time … and when I discovered their site (I go on excursions into the wild wild web daily) I thought of you… my reader 😀
So go forth and streamline your business… make me proud!
PS. Remember you can now quickly reach my blog by typing http:// voiceemporium.com
I agree. FreshBooks is a great invoicing and time tracking program that is super easy to use.
Not only that, but it allows the data to be integrated into other programs to complete your bookkeeping or other needs. They allow API integration, and CSV downloads of all your data. And, there is also an entire list of extras and addons it’s clients have available to use. It is really a great service.