Freelancing: A Business or Just Remote Employment?




Greater than 3 minutes, my friend!

Dear friends!

This October we’re partnering up with our friends from Protemos to promote their translation business management system.

Protemos is packed with incredible features, including reporting, invoices, payment tracking, and much more.

The Freelancer account is absolutely free and you can create one right here.

Thank you for supporting The Open Mic and happy translating!

Hugs from Toronto!

~ Dmitry

Freelancing: A Business or Just Remote Employment?

Translators dive into freelancing for various reasons: flexible hours, freedom to do what they like, and potentially higher earnings. But do they stop being employees and start being single-person businesses?
It is not a question of simply having a boss, or not commuting to an office. You can still be an employee even if you are not officially employed anywhere. Let’s clarify the difference.

This is how employment generally works:

You are doing your translation job and you get paid. However, you are supported by a number of people: sales and marketing people search for clients, project managers keep you busy with work, accountants take care of your finances, and tech support may help you with any technical problems. But all of them are getting paid from the money that customers pay for YOUR translation.

So you may dream about getting the whole cake, not just part of it:

2 protemos article image

 

But it does not work that way. You simply cannot get rid of these supporting activities. You’ll get a very different picture:

3 protemos article image

You will have to do it all yourself, and the hours that you spend on it are not paid by anyone. So your REAL per-hour income also depends on how much time you spend on these supporting activities. And you have to do them as effectively as possible, because otherwise you are in fact reducing your own salary.

To put it simply, you need to spend the minimum amount of time to get the maximum possible result.

These are the most boring things you have to do: keeping track of your projects, issuing the invoices, controlling the payments from your clients, and making analytics to see the overall picture of your translation business.

So, you need to remember all your contacts, store the files somewhere, remember the deadlines, issue and send invoices to your clients, record the payments and keep track of any unpaid invoices, and eventually see the big picture.

All this is normally done using a number of tools like mail client, calendar, your folders structure, spreadsheets, invoice generators, etc.

4 protemos article image

You need to keep the same information in many tools at the same time, and sometimes it leads to chaos. You may spend hours trying to discover which invoices have not been paid yet, or searching for the files that you delivered to your client half a year ago.

But there are tools that let you keep everything in one place. Here we’ll show one of them, Protemos. It’s simple and free to use for freelancers.

Protemos is an online cloud service, so you do not need to install anything. Just go to https://protemos.com and click Sign-up:

5 protemos article image

Then the wizard will ask you to provide some basic info, e.g. what languages and specializations you are working with, your currency, your bank info for invoices, etc. When you are done with it, you’ll see the following interface:

6 protemos article image

After that, you’ll need to enter or import your clients as described here. For every client, you may add contact info, contact personsprices taxes and documents:

When your clients are in the system, you can create projects for them:

For every project, you may store the files, record the deadlines, and enter how much the client should pay you:

When the project is complete and files are delivered to the client, you may generate a PDF invoice and send it to the client:

When the client pays, you may record that payment:

And the system will warn you by email if you do not finish the project within deadline or if the client does not pay you in time:

Having recorded everything in Protemos, you’ll be able to hide or find any piece of information with special search filters:

E.g. you may display all projects done for specific clients or find all overdue invoices by defining the search criteria. And this data can be exported to Excel:

And if you are using the system for long enough, you’ll be able to generate the financial reports: how much you are making every month, how much you are getting from each client, etc.:

With Protemos, you can save time on administration and accounting, get the full picture of what you are doing, and save time for more productive work or for your leisure.

You may find more info on Protemos web site.

The Open Mic Team

About The Open Mic Team

Howdy friends! This is the official account for The Open Mic Team. Follow us for tips, news, announcements and exciting deals from our sponsors and advertising partners.

Leave a Reply

The Open Mic

Where translators share their stories and where clients find professional translators.

Find Translators OR Register as a translator