Freelancers of IH - what is your "back office" stack/setup (ex. LLC, accounting tools, tax optimizations, etc)?

Late to this thread but it really resonated. We spent the last year building free tools specifically for UK freelancers, things like MTD tax calculators, invoice generators, late payment interest calculators, and dividend tax tools. 25 tools so far, plus around 200 blog posts on the tax and admin side.

The biggest lesson? Nobody actually searches for "freelancer tools" until they are panicking about a deadline. Our traffic spikes hard around Self Assessment deadlines. So we ended up building a lot of content around those specific pain points, MTD submission deadlines, allowable expenses, flat rate VAT, because that is when people are most desperate for help.

The whole stack is free at landolio.com if anyone wants to poke around. Would love to hear what tools other UK freelancers here are actually using day to day, most of the replies above are US-focused.

In the UK there's a bank called Coconut which automates everything in terms of finances - so you send invoices from it and take payments, and use the card for all your expenses. I love it - super simple to use.

Then I used an Airtable to track time and would send a link along with the Coconut invoice to itemize it all.

Then use my product Taskable of course for project/task management - we started working on this to give freelancers and anyone else working across teams a place to put all your work into a single view.

I tried Toggl and really didn't like it/found it overly confusing.

I use hellobonsai for as much as I can. I find using a "batteries-included" suite of software has some inadequacies in certain products (for bonsai its their project management tool), so I fill in the gaps as needed with tools like Trello and Airtable.

A lot of different providers, but if you are US based then I'd think about a solo 401k.

I'm full time software dev, but my brother is a freelancer, so I helped him get a solo 401k set up. It let him set aside ~60k pretax for his 401k...deducting 60k from taxable income, so tax savings of ~27k for him AND the retirement funds are still kind of available, because you can take out up to 50k from YOUR own money as a loan. No restrictions on what he gets to spend that 50k on.

I have multiple business including freelancing, but I funnel it all through a single S Corp so I don't have to pay self-employment tax on my full income.

I use QuickBooks for bookkeeping and Asana for task management. I setup a workspace for each client so they can add tasks for me to work on and I can easily keep track of what I need to do next.

I rent a small office down the street from my house because I sometimes find it hard to focus at home with four kids, a dog and three cats :)

For time tracking and invoicing, I ended up building my own solution called TaskBill.io. I tried a bunch of time tracking apps and none of them worked the way I wanted them to.

I'm mostly in Airtable for any record keeping or data storage, Trello for Task Management, Google Suite for collaboration.

PayPal for Invoicing (unless it's a productized service that I have Stripe integrated into).

I do manage all my finances in a Google Sheet, I use both Chase and Ally Bank for my finances (I've started cobbling together my own Profit First financial method).

Software stack : Slack , Notion.so , Clockify.me , Google Drive, Google sheets and an old school pen and paper.

gusto for most things.... google sheets for everything else.