The eight numbers every freelancer should know

Freelancers tend to track either nothing or everything. Nothing means decisions get made on mood. Everything means a dashboard you built once and stopped opening. Eight numbers, on three different cadences, is enough to run the business well.

Weekly, fifteen minutes

• Cash on hand, minus tax set aside. What you actually have. The subtraction is the important part, because collected tax money is not yours.
• Outstanding invoices, with age. Anything past due gets a reminder that day. Aging receivables are the most common form of freelance money left on the table.
• Committed revenue, next 60 days. Signed work plus retainers. The earliest possible warning that the pipeline needs attention, and it warns you while you are still busy enough to sell well.

Monthly, thirty minutes

• Revenue, and revenue by client. Watch concentration. Above 40 percent from one client is a risk to manage, above 60 percent is employment without the protections.
• Expenses by category. Catches subscription drift and tells you your real cost base, which is what your rate has to cover.
• Billable percentage. Billable hours over hours worked. Falling means overhead is growing and prices need to follow.

Quarterly, an hour

• Effective hourly rate, overall and by project type. Revenue minus costs, divided by all hours worked. The number that decides what work to seek and what to stop taking.
• Repeat revenue share. What proportion of income came from clients you had worked with before. Low means you are running a permanent sales operation. High means the business compounds.

What each number changes

A metric that does not change a decision is decoration. These map directly:

• Cash and receivables change what you chase this week.
• Committed revenue changes whether you sell this month.
• Concentration changes who you go looking for next.
• Expenses change what you cancel.
• Billable percentage changes what you automate or reprice.
• Effective rate changes your prices and your client mix.
• Repeat share changes how much effort goes into follow up versus new business.

Deliberately not on the list

• Vanity followers and traffic, unless a channel demonstrably produces enquiries.
• Hours worked as a goal. More hours is not an achievement, and treating it as one leads directly to the wrong pricing decisions.
• Number of clients. Useful only as an input to concentration. Twelve small clients can be more work and less money than four good ones.
• Revenue alone. The most commonly celebrated number and the least informative on its own, because it says nothing about cost, hours, or sustainability.

Make them reports, not projects

Each of these should be readable in a minute. If producing your effective hourly rate requires exporting three files and building a spreadsheet, you will do it once. The prerequisite is that hours, invoices, and expenses share the same client and project identity, which is the whole reason the Durvy apps sit on one shared record rather than four separate ones.

TL;DR

• Weekly: cash minus tax, aged receivables, committed 60 day revenue.
• Monthly: revenue and concentration, expenses by category, billable percentage.
• Quarterly: effective hourly rate by project type, and repeat revenue share.
• Skip vanity metrics, hours as a goal, and revenue in isolation. Every number should change a decision.