On the one hand, I consider myself lucky: I have two professional activities and I love them both. But on the other hand, it means being autonomous, and if you don’t delegate all the paperwork and the control of these activities to a manager, you must be dizzy between bills and endless calculations. And that everything goes into paying taxes, of course.
But over the years, I not only learned to manage it all on my own: I also I managed to do this based on a single application I have on my Mac, iPhone and iPad: Numbers. And on top of that, Apple lets you have it for free.
The most versatile spreadsheet is not Excel
Be freelance This involves taking care of several things:
- Instead of receiving a payroll or salary, you issue your own invoices that you must generate.
- You must keep a book of sales and purchases.
- You need to control and account for any work expenses you may have.
- You must declare the taxes you collect yourself and deduct from your invoices, including VAT and personal income tax.
Numbers is primarily a spreadsheet, which makes sales and purchase books the first obvious application to leverage in this program, including work expenses. I condense it all into one file of numbers, with multiple tabs/sheets, which I store in iCloud Drive so I can view and edit it wherever I am. Yes, including iPhone.
In fact, I have a small spreadsheet that I always use from my phone to control my daily expenses, even outside of work. I never got used to personal finance apps like those of the banks themselves or of Money Pro, I always ended up replacing them with simple spreadsheets.
And for the invoices? Well, it may surprise you, but Numbers itself also has a template for creating your own invoices and without its spreadsheet aesthetic:
Believe it or not, this is a spreadsheet. This is the most differential fact between Numbers and Excel.
You can modify this template to your liking, creating an invoice that matches the measurements of a DINA4 sheet. And of course, you can export these invoices directly in PDF format to send them to whoever you want.
And how do you access these spreadsheets? Easy: with shortcuts. I have them all in the Widgets section of my iPhone, so I don’t have to search for the Numbers app on my iPad. Each of them is a simple shortcut to directly access a file, nothing more:
Another obvious advantage is that I don’t have to subscribe to a specialized accounting service to keep my figures, which is a saving. Plus, Numbers spreadsheets take up so little space that they wouldn’t be a problem even if you had the meager 5GB of free iCloud. I can even keep a financial record for all the years without worry.
I don’t doubt the additional conveniences that personal finance apps can give me, but in my case I got too used to my custom spreadsheets in numbers. There have been too many years with this type of management and a sudden change to other applications would have a big impact on my operating mode.
Imagen | Scott Graham
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