On of the biggest problems I face as a freelancer is trying to work out the correct price to quote a prospective customer. In an ideal world I would just take the amount of work that needs to be done, divided it by the number of man hours to complete it than multiply that by my  hourly rate.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work out like this, there are all sorts of other considerations. Is this a possible long term repeat customer? If so I should quote keenly. Is it one of my friends? Can I really charge my friends full price? Do I actually want to do the job or should I price it high so that if I win the bid at least it makes the job more appealing?

As you can see things are far from simple, it has gotten even more complicating since I have started to outsource some of my work, I now need to factor in bank charges, employee rates, add a small percentage to cover jobs that don’t get paid due to the customer disappearing but that I will still have to pay my outsource people for, all sorts of things.

I think I will start looking around for some software to help with all of this, there must be something out there, hopefully web based that can deal with business administration. Either that or find another outsource person that can handle the administration for me but I have a suspicion that will just compound the problem.