One of the biggest pains when your employed as a contractor or freelancer is faced when you need to keep your financial records in order. Sure it’s OK to hire an accountant to help you with running your limited company or help file the tax return every quarter but that doesn’t eliminate the need to do regular housekeeping as a self employed pro. Entering expenses, raising invoices, managing clients or checking inventory levels over time can turn into a nightmare if not managed correctly.
Let’s face it most people just plain don’t like managing their business books. Hiring an accountant to take away this pain helps to a certain degree but you still need to do your regular housekeeping. For several years I used spreadsheets to track my income and expenses…it worked out OK at first but over time it because a daunting task.
Each month I would copy the details from a previous month and then save the file in different directories on my business PC. Then the clients would change billing methods so I’d have to change my spreadsheet and refile the document in different ways, overtime this directory had filled up with messy files and I was stuck with a problem which was more messy then a spaghetti bowl.
I did some research and I found out that the market for online business bookkeeping was relatively small with only a handful of companies offering systems which allowed contractors or freelancers to manage their records online. At the same time several friends of mine who were facing similar issues with spreadsheet based bookkeeping hell and were keen to build a system from scratch to solve a ‘not so’ unique problem. Several months of late nights and a thousand coffee cups later we invented Net Numero.
Net Numero set itself apart in simplicity as it’s tailored to the freelance and contractor market. I’ll be covering Net Numero in more detail in the following months as we introduce a range of new features, in the mean time head over to the Net Numero website to find out a lot more.
Tags: contractors, freelancers, Innovation, netnumero, Small Business, spreadsheets