The accounting, invoicing, expense, and banking tools built for one-person businesses. What each one does well, what it costs, and who it does not fit.
Docusign’s Business Pro plan costs $45 per user per month. On an annual plan it includes “up to 100 Envelopes per user per year.” That works out at about eight sends a month on a plan costing $540 a year, and it is written in the footnotes rather than on the tile. Free tiers are…
QuickBooks Self-Employed is no longer a plan you can buy. Type quickbooks.intuit.com/self-employed into a browser and you land on a page for a different product called QuickBooks Solopreneur. The plan grid on Intuit’s main pricing page does not list Self-Employed at all — the sign-in menu still links to selfemployed.intuit.com for existing accounts, but there…
Almost everything written about Upwork’s freelancer fee describes a sliding scale — 20% on the first chunk of a client relationship, 10% after that, 5% above a threshold. That structure is gone. The current fee is set per contract, it is disclosed before you accept, and it does not move afterwards. Here is what Upwork’s…
Mozey handles the paperwork side of a one-person business. You write a quote, turn it into a contract the client signs on screen, invoice against that contract, and scan receipts as the year goes. The totals come out the other end shaped like a Schedule C, the form sole proprietors use to report business profit….
Zoho Invoice and Square’s free plan both cost nothing, cover more invoices than a one-person business will send, and chase the client on their own once the due date passes. Invoice Ninja is free up to five clients. But the tool is not where your money goes. On a $2,500 invoice the fee is $73…
One Schedule C, one state, no employees, no inventory, no S corp election. That is a software return, and paying a person several hundred dollars to type it in buys you nothing you did not already have. Six specific things move you across the line. Until one of them happens to you, the answer is…
You do not have to buy anything in your first year. A freelance business has five jobs to cover — send invoices and get paid, keep a ledger, pay the IRS, keep receipts, remember the dates — and every one of them has a free answer that is good enough to carry a real business….
If you have no budget and only send a few invoices, Wave has a free plan that does the bookkeeping. If you drive for work, QuickBooks Solopreneur at $20 a month is the only one of the three that tracks mileage by phone GPS, and that deduction is usually worth more than the subscription. If…