[robrecord]

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience setting up projects for freelance work? Specifically: Do you include the project's billing & correspondence actions in the project itself? Or do you have separate (maybe single-action) lists for these?

The question arose as I added due dates to freelance projects - but then realised that the project is considered completed when the work is done and the client is happy. But invoicing, administration and correspondence tasks may exist after the project is considered 'completed', or before it has officially begun.

It seems using separate lists would be a natural solution, but the downside is you have to remember to add actions for your projects (eg invoice client A for project X) - unless of course you make an action to 'scan completed projects & create invoices' but I imagine it's still not perfect..

Any ideas I might not have considered? Should I create distinct sub-projects for all stages of a project (including admin) and attach my project due-date to the main 'do the work' sub-project?

[avit]

I think this depends a lot on your invoicing style:

Do you only invoice when a project is complete?
Do you invoice at regular intervals?

If you invoice each project immediately when finished, then it makes sense to put the task on the project.

If your invoicing is done at regular intervals, then I would say make a task for "Invoicing" that repeats every 2 weeks, and do all your projects as part of that task.

If you don't have a separate system for tracking unbilled work for invoicing (i.e. nothing to remind you that a project needs to be billed) then it might make sense to put an item on each project as well, regardless of whether you use a master task for it.

Also, individual tasks for invoicing each project should be more manageable chunks, depending how complex your projects are. I find that a single "Invoicing" task can look daunting when you know it will take you a couple hours to work through it.

[Oogiem]

My invoicing is a bit odd, it's usually related to receiving payment for specific sheep before I ship them to their new homes so I have invoicing for the animal(s) plus all vet work as an action (and transport if I am paying it on pick-up) and then an action to track that I've received payment before a sheep puts one hoof on a trailer. Since sales of breeding stock are irregular it makes no sense to have a generic invoicing action or project. I may not sell any for months and then I'll sell a bunch over the course of about a month.