Freelance project tracking: where every job stands, without a spreadsheet

You have five jobs on the go. You know roughly which ones. What you do not know is which of them is waiting on you and which is waiting on the client.

So you reopen three conversations to check. You find a message from last week asking for the copy, never answered. You chase it. And you do the whole thing again next Tuesday, because two other jobs have moved in the meantime.

The problem is almost never forgetting a job. It is not knowing, without going to look, what each one is stuck on.

Why the spreadsheet never survives

Everybody has made one. A client column, a status column, a date column, and it is perfectly accurate on the day it is created.

Three weeks later it lies. Always for the same three reasons.

It is not where things happen. The job moves forward in a conversation, an email, a voice note. The spreadsheet is in another tab. Updating it is a separate act that helps nobody at the moment it needs doing, so it is the one that gets skipped when the day is full. Which is to say always.

It describes what you believe, not what is. "Waiting on client", written on Monday, says nothing about whether they replied on Wednesday. The conversation is still the only reliable source, so you go back to it, so the spreadsheet saved you nothing.

The client cannot see it. So they go on writing to ask where things stand, which is exactly the load tracking was supposed to lift.

Tracking that has to be kept up by hand is not tracking. It is a second job, on top of the work.

Four states are enough

The temptation, when you build your own tracking, is to slice it finely: mock-up in progress, first proposal sent, feedback received, revisions under way. It looks more precise and it is unusable, because every extra state is a decision to make on every change, and one more chance not to make it.

Four are enough for very nearly any job.

• The brief has arrived. The client has answered, you have not started.
• In progress. It is with you, the ball is in your court.
• Waiting on the client. You asked for something and you are waiting: copy, sign-off, a vector logo, a payment.
• Done. Delivered, paid, closed.

Add a draft for jobs that exist before they are launched and you have covered the ordinary case.

The one distinction that changes a day

Between "in progress" and "waiting on the client" there is not a nuance: there are two different kinds of work.

What is in progress is your day's work. What is waiting on the client is your chasing, which takes five minutes and unblocks days. Those are two lists, they do not get handled at the same moment, and running them together is how a job sits idle for ten days over a question asked once.

If you take one thing away from this article, take that one: a way to see at a glance what is waiting on somebody else.

The client's tracking matters as much as yours

That is the half people forget, and it is the one that costs the most time.

A good share of the messages a client sends are not requests. They are anxiety. "Where are we?" means "I have not seen anything happen for eight days and I do not know whether that is normal". Answering takes two minutes; being interrupted to answer costs twenty.

Somewhere the client can look on their own removes that half. Not a weekly report to write, which would be a third job: a page that says for itself where their job stands, what they have already answered, and above all what you are waiting on from them.

It is the same argument as scoping, seen from the other end: scoping a job without ten rounds of back and forth cuts the number of times you wait; visible tracking cuts what each of those waits costs.

What Kalepio does with it

Every job carries one of the four states above, and your orders filter on it. "Waiting on the client" is the list you open on Monday morning.

The same state is written twice, once for each of you. You read "Waiting on the client"; your client, on their own page, reads "Waiting on your reply". It is the same fact and it is not the same sentence, because it is not addressed to the same person.

Your client keeps one link, from the first brief to the delivery. They have no account to create and nothing to dig out of their inbox: they open the page and they see. What they answered, what is under way, what you are waiting on from them, what is left to pay.

And the dashboard counts what is worth counting: open orders, answers received, what came in over the period.

None of it is updated by hand. That is the only reason it is still accurate in three weeks.

For the part that comes before, the one that decides what there will be to track: what to ask, trade by trade. And for the part after, what order to ask for the money in.

Frequently asked questions

How do you track projects as a freelancer?

By attaching the state to the place the job actually moves rather than to a separate file. Tracking that has to be kept up by hand is tracking that lies within three weeks.

What statuses should you use to track a job?

Four are enough: brief received, in progress, waiting on the client, done. Every extra state is a decision to make on every change, and one more chance not to make it.

Do you need a spreadsheet or a tool to track jobs?

A spreadsheet is fine at two jobs a month. Past that the problem is not the list but how fresh it is: the state has to change because the job moved, not because you remembered.

How do you stop a client asking where things stand?

By giving them somewhere to look. Half of all client chasing is not a request but anxiety, and a page that says for itself where the job stands removes that half.