Background of the Course
Although it’s one of the more boring tasks, accounting work is a very important part of the freelance translator’s work. Starting from writing up an invoice for billing your clients to the end of the month calculations, end of the year calculations, tax report preparations, and checking for unpaid invoices, you need material that lets you grasp the overall progress of your business and see the trend of your revenue and expenses in one glance so that you can establish long term plans for your business. Myself included, I’ve never seen a single translator who is good at or enjoys this kind of work. However, this is something that you have to face head on. The problem is that there aren’t any good accounting systems for freelance translators that I like and the ones sold on the Internet are ridiculously expensive. Furthermore, because you can’t buy the system and must subscribe to it instead, you have to spend hundreds of dollars a year to renew it. (Refer to the lesson 1 preview for more details). Stuck in that kind of situation, there is an accounting system that I constructed myself. Although it’s not a particularly fancy system, I’m confident that it’s quite a decent system in its own right. The reason I say this is as follows.
- It doesn’t cost anything other than the cost of buying this course to construct and manage this system (affordable)
- This system is easy to understand and easy to use (simple)
- It satisfies everything that the client, the accountant, the government, and I want (effective)
- It can easily be changed and adapted depending on a specific client’s request or my own needs (flexible)
- It can easily be expanded when the number of clients increases or when the year changes (scalable)
Other Features of the Course
- It was made by me (who is not good at using Excel) so it’s not difficult to use.
- After downloading and understanding the template files that I’ve created, you can input your own data in it and use it right away.
- Lesson 1 is available free of charge.
Who Will Benefit From This Course
- Those of you who don’t really yet know why a translator needs an accounting system
- Those of you who have so far been doing your accounting work haphazardly
- Those of you who spend too much time on accounting work and receive frequent complaints from clients due to inaccurate invoices
- Those of you who feel burdened by the cost of the expensive accounting systems
- Those of you who have felt like the existing system was too complicated and wanted a system that was easy to use and was easy to adjust
Estimated Duration of Time Needed to Take This Course: One day
The lessons became longer than expected because I created this course with the assumption that the students will have no basic understanding or knowledge of accounting systems or Excel, but if you’re proficient in Excel, it will take you less than 3 hours to construct the system.
Course Table of Contents
Lesson 1: Building an accounting system for translators
1. How Bryan came up with his own accounting system 2. Structure of the accounting system
Lesson 2: Making your first invoice
1. Components of your invoice 2. Cells in the invoice that contain formulas 3. Converting to PDF
Lesson 3: Making invoice by copying
How to copy an entire excel sheet onto another sheet
Lesson 4: Making a file for the same client in a different year
How to make a different file that contains the same excel file template
Lesson 5: How to make a new file and a new folder for a new client
The invoice folder structure
Lesson 6: End of the month filing
1. Taking a look at the end of the month filing 2. A few tips for working in Excel 3. End of the month filing for a different month
Lesson 7: End of the year filing
1. Inputting materials to the end of the year file and understanding the calculation 2. Net income, disposable income and the standard of assessment
Appendix 1: Efforts to receive payment and recording your end of the month filing
1. Don’t work for the system 2. What matters most is the quality of your clients, not your accounting system 3. Send your invoice at the same time as when you send the project file 4. Checking payments quarterly or every 6 months
Appendix 2: How to use the tracking reference number on your invoice
Lessons
Lesson 1: Building an accounting system for translators
Free PreviewLesson 2: Making your first invoice
In this lesson, you will learn how to make an invoice, the most basic and important element in a translator’s accounting system. 1. Components of your invoice Now, I’ve made it really easy to create your invoice. All you have to do is download the file I’ve attached and replace all the information […]
Lesson 3: Making additional invoices by copying
In this lesson, we’ll create a second invoice to send to a client using the invoice XXX Translation 16001 we made in the previous lesson as a template. The good news is that Excel makes it easy to do this type of work so this lesson will be quick and easy. How to […]
Lesson 4: Making a file for the same client in a different year
So far, we’ve covered how to make an invoice for a single client then create multiple invoices by using Move or Copy to copy the sheet. Up until this point, you only need a single excel file. But once the year ends, and we move into 2017, it’s better to create a new file by […]
Lesson 5: How to make a new file and a new folder for a new client
Up until the last lesson, we learned how to create multiple files for a single client. But surely, you’ll need to have more than one client if you plan to support yourself with this job! And since you’ll eventually acquire multiple clients, you’ll need to know how to expand your invoices accordingly. Luckily, this is […]
Lesson 6: End of the month filing
Up until the last lesson, we learned how to make an invoice and expand upon it. As I’ve said in the first lesson of this course, your invoice is the most important thing. As long as you make an accurate invoice each time and print it out, everything will follow easily from that. What I’m […]
Lesson 7: End of the year filing
Thus far, we’ve covered how to make individual invoices and do the end of the month filing. In this lesson, we’ll go over the end of the year filing. End of the year filing is about evaluating how the business has done for the past year by putting together everything you’ve compiled at the end […]
Appendix 1: Efforts to receive payment and recording your end of the month filing
One of the reasons why a translator’s accounting system is so important is you can verify payment from your clients. If you just have a small number clients and work on a handful of jobs you get from them throughout the entire year, it may be possible for you to rely on your memory alone […]
Appendix 2: How to use the tracking reference number on your invoice
In Appendix 1, we talked about how to find invoices that haven’t been accounted for due to the clients’ mistake. But it’s not always the client who makes the mistake. Sometimes, I make one myself. There is only one mistake that I make when it comes to invoices. (In my defense though, it […]