Freelance Musician Excel Spreadsheet

By David J. Hahn
New York, NY

When I first started freelancing full-time as a musician, I found that I was quickly losing track of my income, and I was frustrated with the freelance accounting software that I found. I tried Quickbooks and several others, but I felt they were over-complicated with many features I would never use. For instance, very few of my projects required formal invoicing, but many project management programs based their organization around the creation and tracking of invoices. Furthermore, there were several specific things that I wanted in a financial tracker that I couldn’t find to my satisfaction in invoice-based accounting software.

I ended up creating my own Excel spreadsheet, gave it the super-hero name GigTracker, and I’ve been using it for several years now. I took the template and filled it with examples and it is available here for download as an ZIP file.

GigTracker.zip – Excel Template for Freelance Income

I’ve found the GigTracker spreadsheet is very helpful with a variety of issues.

Project Tracking

The first sheet holds all of the information about each individual gig, including the name of the event, date, time and place.

The column “Agreement” refers to the financial agreement between the freelancer and the client, for instance, the gig will pay $100 an hour for a minimum of 3 hours. I find this very helpful when deciding what to charge potential clients. If I get a similar gig in the future, I can refer back to the spreadsheet to remember what I charged for that particular kind of gig and charge accordingly.

Pay expected can sometimes be different than the pay received (ain’t that the truth!), so there are separate columns for each. As you’ll see in the Cash Flow Chart, this helps understand your projected income as well.

The contact person for each gig is, of course, very important. Even though I have every contacts information stored in my address book or phone, I find it convenient and safe to have this information duplicated on the spreadsheet as well.

Monthly Cash Flow Projection

In the Analysis sheet and Cash Flow Chart you’ll see the “Expected Pay” and “Received Pay” columns are broken down and summed by month. This gives a numerical and graphical break-down (and warning) of the various valleys and peaks of the average freelance income. I’ve found this kind of information to be incredibly useful in preparing for slow months and for saving what money I need to during the busy months. Over several years in the same market, its possible to see seasonal trends in these charts (spring is often a busy time of year for freelance musicians, November is not), and that is also valuable information to know.

Projected Annual Salary

On the final Summary sheet, the expected income for the year and the total received income are calculated. There’s also an interesting trick on this sheet – the “Annual Salary at Current Rate” – and I like this feature a lot. This box calculates how much money you’ve received to date, divides it by the number of days that have past in the current year, multiplies that average by 365, and gives a projected salary for the year based on the current rate of income. For instance, lets say it is March 31st (exactly 90 days from January 1st) and you have made $10,000 to date. That’s an average of about $111 a day, and if you were to continue that average through the rest of the year, you would end up making a little over $40,000 for that year.

I like this feature because it gives you an idea of where you stand on your current salary compared to what you made in the previous years, what you’d like to make in the current year, or how it compares to the average salary of other jobs. It can be a nice luxury to know how your current rate of income stands.

This feature is, of course, just an estimate, but it becomes more accurate as the year goes on.

Summary

This template is a helpful and simple indicator of the current and projected income of a freelance business or individual. There are more complex and accurate accounting tools available, but this one has very little learning curve and is as expandable as you can make it.

About the author

David J. Hahn is a freelance music director, accompanist and writer. Originally from the Chicago area, he now lives in New York City and works primarily in musical theatre. Find out more at his website and follow him on Twitter.

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Thanks!

kt
10/13/2008

thanks!!!

Edgar
3/29/2009

Might I suggest using it as a Google Docs spreadsheet? That way you can get to it whenever/wherever and sync it up with a personal contacts spreadsheet instead of having to wait until you get home and in front of your computer.

Rich
12/8/2009