Nearly each enterprise I’ve began has concerned hiring freelancers. They’re extra reasonably priced and versatile, plus it’s simpler to scale up or down as wanted. One or two is simple, however issues can get messy if you’re coping with any greater than that.
I’ve since constructed my very own customized freelancer administration system, I began with freelancer administration templates. Right here’s a curated checklist of my favorites.
monday.com: A robust and versatile freelancer administration template
Trusted by over 225,000+ companies, monday.com is likely one of the hottest challenge administration platforms on the market. It’s excellent for those who want an organized and versatile solution to handle work on your in-house workforce, freelancers, companies, and even different departments.
monday.com has a free plan for as much as two customers. It’s restricted, however it’s a good place to begin if you wish to attempt it out earlier than paying.
Extra on monday.com: monday.com Evaluate | monday.com vs Jira | monday.com vs. Notion.
To begin, you’ll want so as to add your entire assets, together with freelancers and in-house workforce members for those who’re managing their work right here too. From there, you may invite as many visitor customers as you might want to at no additional value.
As soon as they’re onboarded, you can begin assigning duties. They’ll have the ability to monitor their time, monitor deadlines, add information, depart feedback, and extra.
The most effective half about this template is the way it brings your entire outsourced duties collectively. You’ll simply have the ability to hold monitor of the whole lot occurring outdoors the corporate in a single place. Every job can have its personal standing, allotted period of time, due date, proprietor, and assignee.
It’s easy, but efficient. You can even add extra columns if you might want to.
monday.com makes it straightforward to regulate entry and enhancing capabilities so that you don’t have to fret about freelancers having the ability to see belongings you don’t need them to.
ClickUp: A Kanban-style freelancer administration template
ClickUp is one other highly effective choice if you would like an entire challenge administration answer.
Its beneficiant free plan contains collaborative doc sharing, whiteboard options, dash administration, calendar views, and Kanban boards. It’s greater than sufficient to get began and plenty of smaller companies can keep on the free plan for fairly a while.
You’ll have the ability to invite as many free customers as you’d like, simply remember the fact that you received’t have granular entry controls until you improve.
Extra on ClickUp: ClickUp Evaluate | ClickUp vs Asana | ClickUp vs. Notion.
Kanban boards are easy, acquainted, and extremely visible — they’re nice for managing tasks and duties, particularly these you’re outsourcing to a contractor. They seemingly received’t need to be taught a brand new system or surprise the way it works.
All it’s a must to do is create a backlog of duties, assign them, set due dates, and invite them to collaborate with you on ClickUp.
They’ll have the ability to handle their work, mark duties as full, depart feedback, ask questions, collaborate on paperwork, chat with you, and extra.
It takes just some minutes to configure the whole lot for those who’re utilizing this template as is. In any other case, it might take as much as an hour to customise it to match your wants. You may alter the columns, fields that present on every card, what it seems like if you open a card, and nearly each different factor.
You may even flip off options you aren’t going to make use of. This ensures no person makes use of them accidentally.
Knack: Handle tasks, resumes, and invoices in a single place
Knack is a no-code improvement platform that’s nice for corporations who wish to create their very own customized apps. You should use it to construct internet portals, databases, challenge trackers, and even a listing to handle your entire freelancers.
There’s no free plan, however there’s a 14-day free trial if you wish to attempt it earlier than you make investments. Plans begin at $59 per thirty days.
It’s a bit dear, however it’s price it for those who want the extent of customization it offers.
This template is nice for those who want a full system to handle freelancer tasks and duties, invoices, service agreements, and resumes.
It means that you can create an entire listing of each freelancer you’ve ever labored with. This may be helpful if you wish to have an accredited checklist of contractors or a big pool of freelancers you may decide from at any time.
It’s additionally invaluable for those who do loads of recruiting or biking by.
You’ll have the ability to categorize your listing based mostly on their abilities, expertise degree, kind of settlement, or some other customized attribute you’d like. This makes it straightforward to seek out precisely what you want if you want it.
Contractors will have the ability to ship invoices and even add a portfolio of their work instantly throughout the platform. They’ve full entry to their profiles and may replace them any time.
The draw back of this template is how a lot upfront work is required. You’ll seemingly need to do a little bit of customizing, coaching, and tweaking earlier than you begin utilizing it. Constructing a customized no-code app is all the time more difficult than you assume it’ll be.
However it undoubtedly pays off for those who want it.
Airtable: A complete freelancer administration database
As a strong relational database builder, Airtable makes it straightforward for non-developers to construct methods, together with a freelancer administration database. On prime of that, you may make the most of automations to streamline notifications, job assignments, and extra.
Airtable’s free plan helps as much as 1,000 information per base, which is greater than sufficient to begin.
Extra on Airtable: Airtable Evaluate | Airtable vs Asana | Airtable vs Trello.
This template comes with prebuilt tables for contractors, assignments, tasks, and your inner workforce. Though it’s technically for managing contractors and their work, you need to use it to handle in-house tasks and duties in the identical place with out making too many changes.
For every contractor, you may add their space of experience, occupation, portfolio, work hyperlink, contact, secondary specializations, approval standing, and call info.
Out of the field, it covers the whole lot you might want to learn about every freelancer. It even has a particular view for monitoring them by your recruitment pipeline.
As soon as on board, you may affiliate contractors with their assignments, set due dates, clarify challenge scope, connect your contact, and some other particulars it’s possible you’ll want.
Airtable’s flexibility means you may add new fields, take away fields, or edit present fields to make it be just right for you.
With every project, the supervisor will have the ability to add suggestions. Over time, you need to use this to find out if you wish to hold working with particular freelancers.
General, it’s versatile and highly effective if you wish to do loads of customizing.
Asana: An easier freelancer administration template for small to mid-sized groups
To this point, we’ve lined extremely versatile and highly effective challenge administration choices. Asana isn’t as versatile, however is way simpler to make use of. It has a inflexible hierarchy and eliminates the issue of there being dozens of various methods to perform the identical factor.
Out of the field, it’s able to go with out a lot reconfiguring. Its free plan can be probably the greatest, permitting for limitless duties, tasks, and storage for as much as ten customers.
Extra on Asana: Asana Evaluate | Asana vs Basecamp | Asana vs Wrike.
After including this template to your account, you’ll begin with creating an inventory of your freelancers. You’ll have the ability to save their contact info, charges, areas of experience, and previous tasks. This can be a nice useful resource as your contractor pool grows bigger.
From there, you may assign work, share paperwork, set due dates, and collaborate instantly inside Asana.
Customers will have the ability to kind and group duties nevertheless they’d like, and there are quite a few completely different views they’ll select from — Listing, board, timeline, and calendar to call a couple of.
However maybe the very best a part of this template (and Asana basically) is that every challenge has a devoted message board. This implies freelancers can message your workforce and anybody on the challenge can reply.
Managers and supervisors can even recognize its inbuilt automation guidelines and customizable dashboards.
Excel, PDF, and Google Docs freelancer administration templates
If you happen to’re working with a handful of contractors and don’t want a system for collaborative job monitoring, you need to use a spreadsheet or doc to remain organized.
Even for those who determine to make use of a extra complete platform for managing your freelancers, every of the templates beneath can nonetheless be a helpful useful resource.
Template 1: A freelancer invoicing template (PDF or Excel)
It might sound apparent, however requiring freelancers to make use of your invoicing template goes a good distance in making certain every bill contains all the main points you want. I used to let freelancers bill nevertheless they’d like and it wasn’t till I introduced a controller on board that I spotted I wanted a extra standardized method.
Except for standardization, your workforce will have the ability to course of them quicker and keep away from frequent errors when issuing funds.
They’ll know methods to spot issues early to make sure everybody nonetheless will get paid on time.
This free HubSpot template is accessible as a PDF or Excel file. All it’s a must to do is present your electronic mail handle and some particulars about your small business.
File in hand, you can begin by filling out your organization info, like your title, handle, cellphone quantity, and electronic mail.
From there, you may present a duplicate to every of your freelancers. They’ll have the ability to duplicate it and fill in their very own info earlier than submitting it to you for cost.
There’s an space to explain the scope of labor, checklist every job accomplished, and calculate complete quantity due based mostly on hours labored and their hourly fee. You may simply replace this for those who cost by challenge or deliverable as a substitute.
On the backside, freelancers also can add a tax fee, low cost, or transport and dealing with charges if wanted.
Template 2: A one-page challenge temporary template (Google Docs)
If you happen to’re on the lookout for a easy, reusable template you need to use to assign work to a freelancer, this free Google Docs template from TeamGantt is a superb choice.
It’s easy and extremely easy, however outlining priorities, expectations, and necessities up entrance usually results in higher outcomes. That is very true when working with freelancers who might not have the identical degree of context as your in-house workforce.
This template means that you can summarize your targets and supply the context contractors want to fulfill your expectations. From there, you may break it down additional into duties and deliverables you want from them.
You’ll have the ability to add screenshots and pictures if wanted, which will be useful for demonstrating what you’re after or offering directions if wanted.
There’s additionally an space to outline what’s out of scope. This may be extremely useful from the freelancer’s perspective — it lets them know what you’ve thought of and don’t want from them. In lots of instances, realizing what’s out of scope is extra useful than understanding what you want.
Within the sidebar, you may add contact info for key stakeholders and others concerned within the challenge. This lets them know who to speak to if they’ve questions.
You may obtain this template in panorama or portrait orientation, relying in your preferences. You’ll additionally have the ability to copy it as many instances as wanted.
How to decide on a freelancer administration template
Until your wants are extremely fundamental, I counsel reframing this query — as a substitute of selecting a template, take into consideration selecting a platform that can work nicely for what you want. From there, you may obtain their freelancer administration template into your account and get began.
That stated, listed below are some elements to bear in mind as you make your resolution.
Stage of element
How a lot info do you might want to seize? Some templates cowl the fundamentals, like electronic mail, cellphone quantity, and pay fee. Others are extremely subtle and canopy earlier work historical past, ranking methods, lively standing, and extra.
Some might even let freelancers arrange a profile, submit invoices, message your workforce, and extra.
As I discussed, every template’s capabilities are closely influenced by the platform reasonably than the template itself.
You’ll seemingly have the ability to add, take away, and replace as wanted however core performance isn’t one thing you may change.
Challenge administration capabilities
If you wish to streamline the way you assign work to your freelancers, you’ll want greater than only a database of their contact info. Take into consideration the challenge administration fashion you wish to use and which varieties of challenge boards you’ll have to facilitate this work.
Some challenge administration methods double as freelancer databases, whereas others don’t have the very best database however shine in relation to monitoring duties.
Scalability
Take into consideration the variety of freelancers you’re presently working with and what number of you’re planning to work with shifting ahead. Some templates work greatest for small groups whereas others can accommodate upwards of fifty+ freelancers.
Finest practices for managing freelancers
I’ve been working with freelancers for almost all of my profession. Over time, I’ve discovered so much about what works and what doesn’t.
Right here’s my greatest recommendation in lower than 5 minutes:
- Stick with a easy onboarding course of.
- Set up a recruitment course of and persist with it.
- Get as particular and clear as you may about your expectations.
- When unsure, over talk along with your contractors.
- Discuss by miscommunications on the cellphone for those who can.
- Keep away from micromanagement. You employed them for a motive — allow them to do their job.
- Be ready to examine their work totally till you belief them.
- Set up long-term working relationships when you may.
- Maintain an ongoing checklist of freelancers you’re snug hiring once more.
- Often filter out these you had been lower than happy with.
- You get what you pay for.
Working with freelancers will be extremely efficient, particularly for those who handle them nicely. Staying organized, maintaining monitor of labor, and paying them on time is vital to mutually helpful partnerships you may depend on for years to come back.
