Two kinds of expense, and why the difference matters
Some costs are yours: the laptop, the software, the desk. Others belong to a job and should be rebilled: the flight, the stock photography, the print run. Treating them the same way produces both a wrong profit figure and, more painfully, unbilled costs you absorb without noticing.
In Flowzivo an expense can be attached to a client and marked as rebillable. Rebillable ones are available to pull onto an invoice and are then marked as billed, which stops the double-billing that spreadsheets invite. The rest go straight into your cost base.
Receipts attached to the entry
A receipt image can be attached to the expense it belongs to. This is unglamorous and it is the single thing that makes the annual accounts survivable, because the alternative is a folder of photographs with names like IMG_4417 and no memory of what any of them were for.
Reports that answer the questions you actually ask
There are four questions a freelancer needs a report to answer: what did I invoice this period, what did I actually collect, what did it cost me, and how much tax have I charged and will need to hand over. Flowzivo reports on exactly these, for any period, and lets you export the underlying rows as CSV for your accountant.
Invoiced and collected are shown separately on purpose. A strong invoicing month with nothing collected is not a strong month, and a tool that conflates the two will let you find that out at the worst possible moment.
Working in more than one currency
If you bill some clients in euro and others in dollars, totalling your year means converting. Flowzivo holds a rate per currency and converts everything to your base currency for reporting, while keeping each document in the currency it was issued in — because the document a client received must never change retrospectively.
The number that actually matters
Turnover is the number freelancers quote to each other and it is close to meaningless on its own. What you want to know is what you kept, and then what you kept per hour worked — because a year at ninety thousand and two thousand two hundred hours is a worse year than seventy thousand and twelve hundred, and the first one sounds better at a party.
Getting to that number needs three things this application collects: what you invoiced, what it cost you, and how many hours went into it. None of them is difficult to record. What is difficult is recording them in the same place, which is the only reason to have them in one tool.
Setting money aside before you spend it
The most common freelance cash flow failure is not a client who does not pay. It is spending money that was always going to be tax, and then meeting the bill nine months later with a quarter of it left. The invoices were paid, the work was good, and the money is gone.
The reports view separates what you have invoiced from what you have collected, and shows the tax you have charged over a period. That last figure is the one to move out of your current account the day it arrives, into somewhere you do not look. No software can do that part for you, but it can at least tell you the number without you having to add it up.
See the reports with a year of data behind them
The demo contains eight invoices spread across the year and a handful of expenses, so the reports view has something real to show rather than a set of zeroes.
Open the demo →Questions
Can I rebill an expense to a client?
Yes. Attach it to the client, mark it rebillable, and it becomes available to add to their next invoice.
Can I attach receipts?
Yes, an image per expense, stored with the entry.
Does it do my tax return?
No. It gives you the figures and the exportable detail your accountant needs. Flowzivo is not an accounting or tax service.
Can I export everything?
Yes, at any time, including a full backup of the whole workspace and CSV exports of individual lists.
Does it handle multiple currencies?
Yes. Documents stay in the currency they were issued in and reporting converts to your base currency.