That inexplicable instinct you have to, at the very least, organise your information around the work you receive as a freelancer is a good instinct, but one which should be explored further. A fellow blogger and friend of mine, whose full-time income is derived from freelance content writing and editing, essentially had her career saved because of the storage and organisation of this information.
She didn’t really know to refer to it as being part of the financial forecasting process at the time, but it’s a good thing that she at the very least kept records. So to her it was just record-keeping.
An effective way to plan for the future
Sure, we’re slap-bang in the middle of some pretty unusual times, as a result of the global pandemic and it has affected every single last one of us, but if you think about it a little more broadly, life will eventually go on. In many respects, it’s already carrying on, as business starts opening up almost fully and the normal economic cycle resumes. If you may have already noticed, business organizations have already started to rely on the services of predictive analysis software (click here to find out more) to iterate their business operations for the coming year or two.
We can make no mistake about the fact that things will definitely be different though, but our society is so advanced in the economic and financial system adopted that any changes will still be based on the fundamentals of the current system.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, and to put it very simply, financial forecasting is a business planning and maintenance construct which draws on the data collected around economic activity to plan for the future. You can either do it by yourself or utilize similar financial services offered by the likes of Early Growth. By doing so, you can gain better insights to make informed business decisions and increase your chances of becoming successful.
In the case of my fellow-blogger-writer-and-graphic-designer friend, her work had dried up almost completely as soon as the pandemic started to gain some serious momentum. The data she’d collected, over the few years she’d been working on a freelance basis, was shown to be of financial value in the hands of a professional financial forecasting entity. I mean she’d basically just been keeping records of orders coming in, how long she spent working on each order and how much she earned from her work.
When the work dried up it showed nothing more than a typical downturn in the economic cycle around her line of business. It was shown that the downturn wasn’t really directly related to the effects of all the measures around the pandemic, but rather a regular occurrence.
With the raw data being made sense of and presented in a way that members of her professional network could understand, she was able to negotiate new payment terms with her landlord, up to 80% off on her telecoms plan, and she was also able to get a neat line of credit from her bank, which otherwise doesn’t offer any form of credit to clients of her nature — personal banking clients who are essentially self-employed as freelancers.
If a professional financial forecasting service provider can get a freelancer such great deals, what then can it do for a more formal enterprising entity?
Sometimes just having a trained and knowledgeable eye look at what appear to be mere records can even spark a revolutionary direction which the enterprise can take to turbo-charge profits, or at the very least, save the business from failing.