Guides: hours, rates and money

Step-by-step answers to what freelancers usually decide by feel: how much you need to earn, where the time goes, how to show a client the work, and how to tell whether a project ate more than it brought.

Each guide covers one task. No need to read them in order.

How much you need

• The Method: a rate you can lean on — what an hour is made of: costs, working hours, tax, markup
• The year goal and the daily norm — what's left of the goal divided by the working days that remain

The rate you actually get

• How the numbers work — every money rule of the product in words
• Raising your rate: from which hour it applies — why past hours don't reprice retroactively, and how to raise it with a client
• Income and the rate you actually get — three values, recognition, and the settlement when a project closes

Hours and the day

• How the time tracker works — what the timer counts, what it does not, and why the day closes at a mark
• The Journal: how it works — why log hours when you work for yourself

Clients and paperwork

• Debt, advances and invoices — debt strictly by invoices, where an advance lands, what the client sees
• A proposal for a client — scope, stages, a price range — and why you must name it
• A menu instead of a range — three or four options with countable parameters instead of a range — and how to price each

Working with others

• Money in a team — everyone's own hourly price, margin per member, what you owe people

Coming next

Guides on plan versus fact, unpaid hours, overtime, invoices, client proposals, working with partners, and multi-month retainers.