16 free services and applications for the beginning freelancer

If you are just starting your small business as a freelancer, then the most important point is the budget for you.

On the Internet is scattered a lot of free services and applications that will help you to move business off the ground and to work with the mind.

A whole range of services designed to simplify each side of your professional activities, from automation of management tasks and monitoring of Finance to communicate with clients and promote their services.

This article contains the most useful, important and free applications and services that need a beginner (and not all) freelancer.

Payments and Billing

To get paid for their services, it is necessary to set the score. To set the account, you need to spend time and to paint, what time on what has been spent and how much is needed to pay the money. It is desirable that such accounts were the most informative and transparent. You do not want to have the client have any questions or hair stood on end when he sees what and how much he has to pay.

To automate and simplify the billing process was invented by a number of services, most of which greatly simplify life, but require financial investments. And since you are a beginner freelancer who needs to start somewhere with a minimum budget, we recommend two free service.

1. Waveapps

comfortable attachmentWhich helps to create and send professionally written account in a couple of clicks. It allows you to monitor the status of your accounts and received the money, so you can know when to come next payment. Monitors not only your income, but also the cost in the form of user-friendly graphical reports.

2. zoho Invoice

Company Zoho has proved a major player in the productivity market with a huge range of tools for CRM, project management and collaboration. zoho Invoice easy to integrate with other products Zoho, but also works well as a separate product. It has a free plan for one user who has no more than five clients. Ideal for novice freelancer who has not yet developed a significant client base.

time management, tasks and projects

If you have a lot of customers, and the number of projects will increase. One will be hard to cope with them. On the Internet there are a lot of useful tools to help you manage a huge number of projects and tasks. But you're still a novice freelancer and can not afford expensive solutions.

3. TMetric

Simple service accounting of working time with a friendly interface. TMetric It is designed to make managing your tasks and customer projects convenient. Despite the fact that the service is easy enough, it is possible to manage your tasks and projects, create customers and assign them to one or the other project, put budgets on a project to obtain detailed reports on time spent, as well as to make money, which brought certain projects. In addition, the service integrates with popular project management systems (RedMine, Jira, Asana, Trello).

4. Freedcamp

As you might guess, this service was created as an alternative and the free version of monstrous Basecamp. Freedcamp It allows you to create an infinite number of projects that add extreme and intermediate deadlines for tasks, create project templates and invite customers. Board tasks allows you to get an overall picture of all projects or to set up e-mail notifications that will alert you when the time comes to another important task.

5. Asana

More advanced solution than Freedcamp. At the same time completely free for teams of up to 15 people. For beginners, this freelancers service will find. Free version will provide you with all the features. Immediately after registration you can manage all their projects and interact with customers using the service friendly interface.

Data storage

Freelancers inherent mobility. They can work not only with their home PC or laptop. It is therefore important to know about the services that allow you to store data in their own cloud.

6. Dropbox

Dropbox - the best service for the storage and transmission of documents. It can store about two gigabytes of files in the cloud for free. But you can get another 16 GB of free space, if you invite your friends to register for the service. Dropbox enables you to synchronize all of your devices, allowing you to access your files with both laptop and smartphone. No longer have to send myself emails with files.

7. Evernote

Flexible platform that will allow you to make it as simple and functional as you want. Evernote - the most convenient service when it comes to storing all important, which could come in handy in the future. Leave notes on your desktop or mobile apps, redirect your letter or use a special Web Clipper, which will help to save web pages, screenshots and everything else that you feel important while surfing in Internet.

Editing documents and pictures

If you're a budding copywriter or web designer, it is important you have available a tool to edit text or images.

8. OpenOffice

Description of the tool It can be summed up in four words - free analog of Microsoft Office. And this is true because, as generous creators not particularly bother with unique functional and distinctive features of their offspring. They took the basic functions of Microsoft Office, and wrapped them in a free wrapper.

9. google Docs

Do a Google company also has its own version of free office tools. In terms of functionality you will not find any breakthroughs or innovations, because google Docs different from the same OpenOffice only in that the former is in the cloud. He is perfect for people who love the versatility and availability of cloud services. Google Docs will be very useful if you work in a small team, which is divided by vast distances, after all edit the same document at the same time can be several people, regardless of their location.

10. Photoshop Express

Most likely, not all freelancers have access to professional graphics processing tools that have a lot of advantages, but there is one drawback - the price. All the serious image editors cost money. This fact becomes deadly for the novice web designer. But as Adobe company, which is famous for its reference graphic editors, I decided to release a free version of Photoshop and lightweight editor. Photoshop Express It has only basic functionality and are unlikely to allow you to create masterpieces, but unpretentious graphics projects this tool - a real find.

CRM

You find the client himself, then another and another. So you have a decent customer base with which you conduct conversation simultaneously. To always be aware of what stage of communication you are staying and what you can discuss promising moments from past clients, you need to have a special tool called a CRM.

11. Insightly

Most CRM or bulky or too expensive for individual use. Service Insightly devoid of these shortcomings. Firstly, it is very flexible and can be integrated with other tools such as Evernote and Google. Secondly, if there is a free version you can have more than 2500 contacts. This will be enough for a long time.

12. CapsuleCRM

Capsule - very pretty CRM, which provides a complete overview of all your contacts. It also allows you to effectively build your process of communicating with customers through the creation of tasks, alerts and reports. Suffice it to a convenient system that allows you to adapt, and the operation of any business. It provides a free plan for 250 contacts.

13. Streak

A very useful tool if you can not live without Gmail. Streak integrates directly into your Gmail-Account, so you can keep track of your correspondence with a plurality of clients without having to switch platforms. At the moment, a completely free service for individual use.

Promoting your business on social networks

Search for clients and work on their image is also quite expensive. Therefore it is very important to use social networks not only for entertainment but also to express yourself as a professional, without which it will not do any project.

14. Hootsuite

Hootsuite - it is a huge board on which to collect data on activity in all of your social networks. Plan the placement of important recordings, watch for trends and current topics in a convenient interface. Recognize potential customers and start communicating with them. Free version will allow you to connect the five social networking accounts.

15. Buffer

This service can be called a lightweight version of Hootsuite. In functionality it is a bit similar to the last, and also has a scheduler autoplacement records. Buffer integrates into your browser and loads the message with content from a variety of popular social networks. With this service, you can select all that now in the trend, to prepare their entry on popular themes and plan their placement. Free option allows you to connect one of your profiles for each social network.

16. Tweetdeck

it is a powerful platformThat allows you to monitor your activity on Twitter in a few accounts. It also provides the ability to view tweets of the people you read about in the form of user-friendly lists, records that were planned arrangement of messages and keep track of all of their popularity profiles. Not so long ago, Twitter bought Tweetdeck, and now you can use it as a powerful analytical tool for free.