No one prepares you for how much time you’ll spend working on administrative tasks for your freelance business.  Being a freelancer involves not only client work, but also working on tasks that help you run the business like putting together proposals, invoicing, and planning your taxes. 

Freelancers spend over 19 hours per month on administrative tasks related to their business. This can include anything from financial management to staffing-related tasks. Without a solid workflow to manage these tasks, the time you spend on this side of your business can take time away from client work, and even end up eating into your free time.  

This is why it’s essential to design a freelance workflow that works for you. 

Below, let’s go over why freelancers benefit from an efficient workflow and how you can take back your time and improve your freelance workflow by automating recurring tasks.

Why Freelancers Need an Efficient Workflow

For freelancers, your workflow includes all of the processes you have in place to keep your business running smoothly and efficiently. This may include the process you have when a client inquiry comes through, the system you have to manage your finances, the steps you take to put together a proposal for a client, or all of the above. 

Without an established workflow, you may find yourself spending way too much time typing out the same responses or scrambling to put together a tailored scope of work. 

To make these processes more efficient, it’s important to find ways to automate and streamline the tasks you do frequently. By automating and streamlining recurring tasks and processes, your business will run in the background while you can focus on the work you actually love to do. 

Looking to speed up your processes? Freelancers who use Wethos say that saving time is one of the biggest results they’ve seen after using the platform.

5 Ways to Improve Your Freelance Workflow

Ready to take back your time and have your business run for you? Optimize your freelance workflow with these tips.

1. Schedule marketing initiatives

Marketing yourself is an ongoing initiative for freelancers. Even when you’re booked with client projects or consistently getting new inquiries, it’s important to regularly promote your work and services if you want to stay on clients’ radars and keep your project pipeline full. 

As Webflow designer Grace Walker shared, “Visibility as a freelancer should be your number one focus.” 

Promoting yourself, whether you share your work on social media or demonstrate your expertise through a newsletter, takes time, and it can feel hard to carve out time to create your own content each week when you have client work to do. 

This is where automation comes in. By setting up a workflow for the marketing activities behind your business, you can maintain your online presence no matter how busy you get. 

Set aside some time at the beginning or end of the month to create content and set up marketing activities like social media posts and newsletters. You can also use this time to refresh your website, look for online communities to join, or create scripts that you can use for client outreach. Once you’ve created content, use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Later to set up your social posts or emails to go out throughout the month.

2. Streamline your proposal process

Another task that freelancers spend a lot of time on is creating a scope of work or proposal. Without a workflow, the process typically goes something like this: you get a new client inquiry, figure out the project details, then spend hours piecing together the different elements to create a tailored scope of work from scratch — all of which is unpaid time. The best case scenario is that your proposal is approved. But the worst case scenario? You spent all of this unpaid time on a scope only to get a “no.” 

If you want to pitch projects faster and accelerate the path to “yes” or “no”, then you need a streamlined proposal process. Instead of creating a scope of work or proposal from scratch with every new project, create a template that has all of the information you find yourself sending to clients again and again. This includes your standard pricing, services, and even contract terms. While you can always adjust the details for each project, having a standard template to start with saves you a significant amount of time in the process.

To make it even easier to streamline this process, Wethos offers a library of customizable scope of work templates. The pre-built, customizable templates make it easy to create scopes in minutes. And, as a Wethos Pro user, you can save all of your services, scopes, proposals, and contract terms in your personal library so you can easily reuse them for future projects and be ready to pitch a client as soon as an opportunity comes your way. 

No more starting from scratch with every new inquiry. By automating this part of your workflow, you can pitch faster, land more work, and dedicate your time to working on the projects you enjoy. 

Learn how one freelancer improved their workflow by using Wethos to reduce the time spent on the proposal process from 7 hours to just one hour.

3. Automate client outreach

As a freelancer, you’ll spend a lot of time either sending emails to potential clients or responding to project inquiries (or both). Either way, you’ll find yourself typing out the same things over and over — whether you’re outlining your services, sharing your pricing, or asking about project details. Do yourself a favor and automate this process. 

Start by creating scripts to send for different scenarios. With a script, you can quickly copy and paste your response instead of spending time crafting an email from scratch.

Here are a few scenarios when it helps to have a script ready to go: 

• When you’re prospecting for new clients: Create one script for your initial outreach, and another script for the follow-up. 

• When you receive a new client inquiry: Write a script that outlines your typical process, availability, price, services, or whatever else you want potential clients to know before getting further into the proposal stage. 

• When a project wraps up: Use a script to ask your client for a testimonial or referral. 

Once you have a batch of scripts ready to go, use a tool to automate the outreach. You can schedule emails to send in Gmail or integrate an automation tool like Zapier or HubSpot into your workflow.

4. Streamline your finance management

Dealing with the financials behind your business is never fun, but there are ways to make the process easier and more streamlined. 

Start by setting up a business bank account. With a business bank account, you can keep all of your business income and expenses separate from your personal finances. 

Once you have your business bank account, set up systems that will help manage your money. For example, you can pay yourself each month by scheduling an automatic transfer to your personal account each month. You can also use a tool like Ruby Money to automatically set aside money for things like your freelance taxes, savings, or even retirement. 

5. Automate client invoicing

Invoicing clients is something that freelancers do on a regular basis since that’s how you get paid as a freelancer. Whether you choose to send an invoice before work starts, on a monthly basis, or after a project wraps up, sending invoices should be a streamlined part of your freelance workflow.  

Use an invoicing tool to easily create, send, and track invoices. With Wethos, for example, you can schedule your invoice to send at a later date. Scheduling helps automate the process and check that off of your mental to-do list so you don’t have to worry about whether or not you sent an invoice for a certain project. You can also send reminders in two clicks if an invoice is overdue, so that you never miss a dollar you’re owed. 

There are a lot of moving parts when running a freelance business. Streamlining certain aspects of the business, like managing your money or sending proposals, is key to getting everything done efficiently and being able to spend your time doing the work you love.

Ready to streamline your proposal process? Sign up for a Wethos Pro account to start saving time with My Library, your personal collection of templates to customize and reuse for future projects.