From Chaos to Cashflow: Must-Know Finance Tools These 3 Solopreneurs Can’t Live Without

Introduction to Solopreneur Finance Management

Ever wondered how other solopreneurs streamline the way that they manage the finance side of their business?

Hear from Susanna Reay, an online business architect, specializing in helping experts monetize their wisdom, Roland Hüse, a freelance type designer with a passion for branding and custom fonts, and Anna Lundberg, a business mentor, empowering corporate professionals to create freedom and fulfillment in their work and life.

You’ll discover all of this after the intro.

Welcome to the Macpreneur Podcast

Hello, hello, and welcome to episode 96 of the Macpreneur podcast.

Whether it’s your first time or you’re a long-time listener, I appreciate that you carve out some time in your busy solopreneur schedule.

I created Macpreneur to help solopreneurs like you save time and money in running their businesses on their Macs.

Now, in order to give you the most relevant Mac productivity tips and information, I need to know how well you’re currently dealing with the three killers of Mac productivity, namely unnecessary clicks, repetitive typing, and file clutter.

For that, just visit macpreneur.com/tips and answer a few questions, which will take you less than two minutes.

After submitting your answer, you will receive personalized time-saving tips based on your results. 

Once again, visit macpreneur.com/tips and start boosting your efficiency today.

Susanna Reay’s Finance Management Tool: FreeAgent

Okay, let’s begin with Susanna, whom I met in the Youpreneur Incubator hosted by Chris Ducker.

Susanna is based in the UK, and she has been working online for over 20 years. She helps service-based business owners, mainly coaches and consultants, understand how they can best monetize their wisdom and expertise. She will share with you the tool she uses to streamline the finance side of her business. And if you’ve listened to episode 92 or 94, the name should be familiar to you.

For the finance side of my business, I use FreeAgent, which is an accounting software, and where this really helps is it completely syncs up with my bank account. In terms of the bank account that I use for all my main business, but also it can sync up with my Stripe account and my PayPal. So it automatically pulls in all the transactions and asks me and notifies me on a regular basis, “Hey, can you categorize this?”

Is it a sale, an expense? Is it marketing advertising? So this really speeds up then doing returns at the end of the year because as you go along, it’s prompting you to say, categorize this, and categorizing it as and when it happens is so much easier than thinking back, “What was that transaction for, like 250 pounds three months ago?”

It’s gone out of my head by then. So FreeAgent is a really cool tool. It’s linked with my business account and with my say, Stripe and PayPal.

Thanks a lot, Susanna. You can connect with Susanna on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Her website is Susanna Reay. R E A Y dot com. I will put all the links in the show notes.

My main takeaway from Susanna is the importance of choosing tools that natively integrate with others. In the case of FreeAgent, it supports the direct import of major banks establishing Great Britain and Northern Ireland that are taking part in Open Banking.

Now for UK banks that don’t take part in that, or for banks in other parts of the world, it’s still possible with FreeAgent to import CSV files that you’d manually export from your bank account dashboard. Even though it’s feasible, it is much more time-consuming.

And so if you’re not based in the UK, then FreshBooks is a much better alternative to FreeAgent.

The reason is very simple. It supports the direct import of bank transactions from banks all around the world. FreshBooks uses different intermediaries based on the bank location, and connecting the bank account that I use for EasyTECH here in Luxembourg was pretty painless.

Now, it’s important to know that the first time that you will set up the connection, it will import a maximum of 90 days of bank transaction activity. And so, for all the transactions, or if your bank is not supported, you can still manually import them from a file in CSV format.

Having said that, FreshBooks is the perfect online accounting tool for solopreneurs, especially those still managing their finances via a collection of spreadsheets.

You can try FreshBooks for free for 30 days, using my referral link, macpreneur.com/freshbooks in one word. Enter your email address or sign up with your Apple ID or Google account. No credit card required. And if you end up becoming a FreshBooks customer after using my referral link, I will get a small commission at no cost to you.

It’s like a virtual high five for recommending stuff that I love and use. So, thanks in advance for supporting me and the Macpreneur podcast.

Once again, visit macpreneur.com/freshbooks to start your 30-day free trial today.

Roland Hüse’s Payment Processing with PayPal

Okay, now let’s hear from Roland Hüse. I met Roland back in 2016 at the Seanwes conference in Austin, Texas.

He’s an extremely talented designer who creates retail fonts and helps businesses with services such as branding, including logos. In fact, Roland created the current Macpreneur logo and color palette. He is serving clients from all around the world, and he will share with you the tool that helps him seamlessly get paid.

Managing finances, I think PayPal is still one of the best options out there. It’s available almost everywhere, except for a few regions. I had a client in Turkey, and we had to arrange a different form of payment, which took more time and effort. Plus, it costs more, but other than that, PayPal is definitely a good choice.

Thanks a lot, Roland. You can find Roland on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. You just search for Roland Huse Design, H U S E. His website is rolandhuse.com.

So, PayPal is the OG online payment processor that launched in 1999. It was owned by eBay between 2002 and 2015 and has been an independent entity since then.

Nowadays, PayPal can be used in more than 200 countries or regions. Now, in some of them, users can only send money, while in other countries, PayPal users can send, receive, and withdraw money.

And as Roland mentioned, PayPal isn’t available in Turkey anymore, according to Wikipedia. They ceased operations there in 2016 after refusing to have data centers located inside the country.

The main competitor to PayPal is Stripe. However, sellers from only 46 countries can create an account to receive payments with it.

On the flip side, Stripe accepts payments from customers located all around the world, via all major credit card providers, but also Apple Pay, Google Pay, SEPA Direct Debit, PayPal, and many more.

Where Stripe shines is the compatibility with more than 450 online platforms. And the extensive developer options through a well-designed API or Application Programming Interface, which allows developers to easily accept payments inside web and mobile applications too.

And on top of that, Stripe offers additional services like Stripe Tax, which helps the process of calculating the amount of tax owed in multiple jurisdictions like the US, Canada, EU, Australia, and the other supported countries.

Being a solopreneur now for over 11 years, my take is that when it comes to PayPal and Stripe.

It’s not an either-or situation but an and situation, provided that you live in one of the 46 countries supported by Stripe. In other words, we solopreneurs should embrace both PayPal and Stripe and use the one that makes the most sense in any given situation.

And if you can’t create a Stripe account, then PayPal is by far the best solution for you.

Anna Lundberg’s Accounting Software of Choice

Last but not least, Anna Lundberg. I met Anna in the Youpreneur Incubator too, and in addition to her coaching activity, she produces the Reimagining Success podcast. In fact, Anna interviewed me back in the summer of 2023. And if you’re curious, head on to episode 249, where you will discover my journey from traditional employment to entrepreneurship.

And for the video version, just visit onestepoutside dot com forward slash macpreneur.

Now, when it comes to boosting the financial side of her business, Anna will share how she’s using FreeAgent too.

When it comes to the finance side of my business, I use FreeAgent. So of course, there are lots of accounting software out there, but that’s the one I landed on back in the day, having given up on my Excel sheets that I used in the first few years of my business a long, long time ago.

What I love about FreeAgent is a few different things. One is it pulls in my bank feed, so automatically everything’s just there. Of course, it’s syncing with my Starling business account. Then also I, of course, can look at any reports so I can see what the cash flow situation is like, incoming, outgoing, very important, and I can look at the P&L reports, you know, partially through the year, as well as at the end of the year, and I can compare to previous years and so on. So that’s something that I would definitely recommend checking regularly in the business to know your numbers. You can really see them very clearly on the dashboard, you know, red, lots of expenses going out, and green, perhaps not so much coming in, so that’s really valuable.

The other really useful part of it is I can generate invoices. So I use that with my B2B corporate clients. B2C is done on my membership site, which is run with MemberPress and Stripe and so on. But the invoices that go to corporate clients, businesses, and the really powerful thing there is, and it seems simple, that it can generate automatic emails.

So, hi there, here’s your latest invoice. But also, ooh, just so you know, the invoice is due next week, it’s due tomorrow, it was due yesterday, and especially of course the overdue invoices, really, really powerful because you then don’t have to spend time doing it, and also you don’t have to have that ickiness of having to chase people, it’s not you as the accountant.

You can even, someone told me once, make up a name for sort of an accountant who’s sending those things for you. Now I, I, my accountant or bookkeeper don’t do that part of it, but of course you could have your, um, Assistant Dave in Accounts, who chases those late invoices that are unfortunately quite common here in the UK, and I imagine they are elsewhere as well.

So just having an overview of my finances, seeing the money coming in and out, the bank feed, and then the really practical, very useful aspect of sending automatic invoice reminders. So that’s FreeAgent.

Thanks a lot, Anna. You can find Anna on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Her handle is Anna S E Lundberg, and her website is onestepoutside dot com.

My main takeaway from Anna is that using a full-featured online accounting tool can help us streamline the finance side of our business because it serves multiple purposes.

Whether it’s FreeAgent, Freshbooks, or Quickbooks Online, these tools can help us create professional-looking invoices, get paid directly from the invoices, and automatically send email reminders and late payment notices.

And by pulling bank account transactions automatically, these tools can give us a pretty accurate overview of our year-to-date profitability.

Now, those tools are not that good at forecasting profitability, which is why I’m still using a dedicated spreadsheet for that. I covered this topic in the previous episode, episode 95.

So if you missed that one, just visit macpreneur dot com forward slash episode and the number 95.

Streamlining Business Operations: A Continuous Improvement Mindset

Before concluding this episode, there’s one more thing I’d like to mention. Don’t beat yourself up for not having fully figured out how to streamline your business yet, whether it’s the marketing, operations, or finance side.

I have been on this solopreneur journey for more than 10 years, and I feel I haven’t fully optimized any of those sides yet. It’s okay. The key is to cultivate a continuous improvement mindset. Look at it more like a marathon rather than a sprint.

Start with one process, say invoicing your clients, and then the first step would be to document that process by writing down everything you do.

At the end of this exercise, you will have your first SOP or Standard Operating Procedure.

Step number two, mentally go through this process several times and ask yourself what could be eliminated, either by rearranging steps or by tackling any of the three killers of Mac productivity: unnecessary clicks, repetitive typing, and file clutter.

Eliminate as many redundant actions as possible. For instance, when I want to send a PDF invoice directly from my EasyTECH email address, rather than from Freshbooks, I need to click several times to print the invoice as PDF. But now, by defining my own keyboard shortcut for the “Save as PDF” action, I can save a little bit of time every time.

Step number three, go through the improved process and now ask yourself: What could be automated?

In my case, whenever a client would pay an invoice by bank transfer, I marked the invoice as paid in FreshBooks, and then I needed to find the associated sale in Podio, my CRM, and manually mark it as paid.

I’ve done that for years until I realized that I could automate it with Zapier. And now, as soon as I enter the payment in FreshBooks, Zapier finds the right sale in Podio and marks it as paid just for me. And with the help of AI, creating these automations in Zapier is easier than ever.

Recap

So to recap, you can save a lot of time managing the finance side of your business by using the right tool or online service.

Like Susanna, see if you can link your online accounting tool to your business bank account for seamless transfer of transactions.

And if you have clients from all around the world like Roland, check out PayPal or Stripe to get paid safely and promptly.

And finally, choose an online accounting tool that can give you quick insights about the financial health of your business and automate the process of sending late payment reminders like Anna. 

Many thanks again to Susanna, Roland, and Anna for sharing their own experience with us.

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a fellow solopreneur and tag me on Instagram. My handle is @MacpreneurFM.

And if you’re ready to streamline your solo business but don’t know where to start, sign up for my 360 tech diagnostics service. After filling out a comprehensive assessment form, we will have a Zoom call during which I will give you my top three recommendations, including tools and services to consider.

After the call, you’ll receive a summary report with the points that we discussed and all the necessary links. And if you decide to work with me one-on-one after that, I will deduct the diagnostic fees from the first coaching pack that you will purchase.

To learn more about that, just visit macpreneur.com/diagnostic or click the link in the show notes.

Season Four Finale and Looking Ahead

So that’s it for today.

In fact, it was the last episode of Season Four, which means that the next episode will kick off Season Five of the podcast, focusing on the digital security of your solopreneur business.

So make sure to subscribe or follow this podcast to get it automatically next week.

And until next time, I’m Damien Schreurs, wishing you a great day.

Thank you for listening to the Macpreneur Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please leave a review and share it with a friend right now.