Last month, I talked about where freelancers work (Working the Home Office and Get Out of the House: Alternatives to the Home Office); now I want to talk about how we work– the tools we use to do our job.
Whatever field you're in – writing, design, consulting, etc. – you no doubt have a set of very powerful desktop programs that you work with every day: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, MS Word, Excel, and so on. For your core tasks, it makes sense to use local tools that can take advantage of your computer's full power. For many other jobs, though, it makes sense to make use of the increasingly excellent variety of online tools available.
Web-based applications have a number of advantages over desktop software, most notably being accessible from any computer with a browser and Internet connection (which is pretty much all of them) so you can work from a client's office, an Internet café, a public terminal at the library or a hotel business center, or from a netbook at a coffee shop or airport. Internet applications are updated frequently (with no effort – or payment – on your part) with new features rolled out quite a bit more often than with traditional desktop software. Plus, many online services take advantage of the Internet to make collaboration and sharing easy.
Oh, and online applications are generally very affordable – some of the best ones are even free!
I know that some people are nervous about security on the Web. While I would advise you to keep local backups of any important documents or data created online, generally I wouldn't worry too much. Consider this: security in your home office is managed by your "IT professional" – which means you – while security at, say, Google is managed by a team of the brightest computer experts in the world. Who do you think is going to be better able to prevent a system failure, or to recover if one occurs? If privacy is an important consideration for you, make sure that any service you use for important material encrypts your data (most do these days) and is accessed through a secure connection (that means you access it by typing "https://" instead of the more common, unsecure "http://".
Bookkeeping and Invoicing
Unless you're actually a bookkeeper or accountant, tracking your business' financial activity is probably your least favorite aspect of freelancing. Outright.com is naturally my choice for keeping on top of my accounts payable and receivable – especially now that they've added automatic credit card import for expense tracking (one of my weakest points). I especially like that they handle estimated quarterly tax payments – if I'd known when I started freelancing that it meant paying taxes four times as often, I might've become a carnie or sewage inspector or politician instead…
Before you worry about bookkeeping, though, you need to get some money coming in, and that means invoicing your clients. There are a few good services online that let you create good-looking, customized invoices, but the one I'm using is Freshbooks, an all-purpose accounting system designed with freelancers in mind. Freshbooks allows you to create and send (by email or even snail mail for a small fee) estimates and invoices, track time spent on your projects (for billing by the hour), and collect payments via PayPal or various credit card gateways (you can even set up automatic payment plans for recurring clients). And as an added bonus, Outright.com will automatically import my Freshbooks data nightly, so I don't have to enter my payments and expenses again come tax time.
Word Processing and Collaboration
Whether you're writing a quick letter to a client or collaborating on a huge technical document, online word processors like Adobe's Buzzword, Google Docs, or Zoho's Writer are often preferable to firing up Word or OpenOffice.org. Buzzword has one of the most gorgeous interfaces I've ever seen on an application, online or off; Zoho Writer offers an incredibly full-featured word processor comparable to Word 2003; Google Docs makes great use of the Web by offering document and folder sharing and publication to the Web, plus a range of great templates. All three offer tons of online storage.
Because word processing is not very resource-intensive, you can easily use one of these services for just about all of your writing, even if writing is your primary job. (I even wrote a book on Buzzword!) But where web-based word processors really shine is in collaboration – you can share documents with clients, co-authors, editors, and anyone else, setting permissions so that your reader can edit anything, just make comments, or only read what you've written. I've seen documents with dozens of collaborators attached – these are very robust systems. And they beat the heck out of Word's "Track Changes" feature…
Voicemail
You wouldn't think of voicemail as an Internet application, but several online services offer great features from customized messages depending on who's calling to message transcription. Far and away the leader of the voicemail revolution is Google Voice, which is unfortunately still an invite-only service (you can sign up for an invite at the site, but there's no telling how long the wait will be). Google Voice assigns you a new number that you can forward to all your other numbers, allowing you to get calls however is most convenient at any given moment. You can apply rules to specific phone numbers – blocking telemarketers, for example, or directing your family members to a friendlier voice message than the one your clients hear – and can even listen in as callers leave their messages. There are even Google Voice applications available for your Blackberry or Android-powered phone (an iPhone app is coming but not yet available) so you can get visual voicemail on your handset (non-Blackberry or Android users can access the site via their phone's web browser).
While you wait for that Google Voice invite, you can supercharge your voicemail with services from YouMail and Fusion Voicemail Plus, both of which require you to forward your voicemail to their services (detailed instructions are available at each site) and download an application to your cellphone to view voicemail. Depending on the account level you choose, you can get customized voicemail greetings for different callers, email or SMS alerts of new messages, call blocking, and voice-to-text transcription.
Remote Access
One of my most-used applications is LogMeIn Free, a remote-access service that allows me to view my home PC's desktop from any browser, anywhere in the world. A small application runs in the background on my computer; as long as the computer's on, I can log in just by visiting the site and it's just like I'm sitting in front of my own computer. I can launch programs, surf the web, send email, move files around, print documents (on my home printer) – do anything I'd normally do at my desktop, because I technically am at my desktop. For free! The paid Pro version allows greater interaction with the local host computer, so I can print documents at home on whatever printer is attached to the computer I'm at, or listen to audio through the local computer's speakers. The free account has been all I've ever needed, but then, I'm a simple guy.
Storage and Backgup
There's a saying in the computer world: "If you haven't backed up off-site, you haven't backed up." You might be religious about saving your PC's setup every night to an external hard drive or copying your Documents folder to DVD ever week, but if those backups never leave your office, you're still at risk. And your clients are still at risk. What if there's a fire, or a break-in, or a hurricane, or an earthquake? Anything that can destroy your PC isn't going to stop short of destroying the backup drive next to it!
Local backups are important in case of computer failure or accidental deletions, but for real security you want to backup online. Both Mozy and Carbonite offer unlimited online backup for under $5 a month. You install a small application on the computer(s) you want to backup, and the rest is automatic – after an initial backup of everything on your computer, they will update your backups whenever you create or change a file. You can recover your files from their websites; Carbonite also allows you to access files individually from their site.
More to come!
This post is plenty long already, and I've got five more essential online applications to share with you. Stay tuned for even more ways to build out what is essentially an "office in the cloud". And be sure to share some of your favorite must-have services in the comments!
Outright is secure.