Taking the Guesswork Out of Planning Ahead

Freelancing is unpredictable by nature. Instead of working for one boss on one team, freelancers serve multiple clients and very often have more than one going with each. Even if you’re only working with two or three clients at a time, that can translate into a slew of projects running simultaneously, multiple concurrent assets in development, and a laundry list of tasks that need prioritizing.

This presents a challenge just trying to figure out how to approach the day. Forming a picture of the week or month ahead can be even more daunting. Planning ahead creates a lot of questions. What do I have to get done this week? Next week? How many projects are currently active? Are my task due dates organized to prevent issues with on-time completion? Which projects are stuck? How are the month-to-date financials looking? 

Answering the Important Questions

While there are applications out there capable of answering one or two of those questions, finding one to answer them all isn’t terribly easy. That’s why we built Hibiscus with a dashboard designed to give not just a snapshot of your business, but also to help freelancers peer into the future and plan their work accordingly.

The Hibiscus dashboard illustrates the tasks at hand and offers a roadmap forward. Imagine for a moment that you are Bartholomew Slopmeister. He makes slop buckets. Slop buckets have many uses which is why Bart has a lot of clients. Right now he’s building slop buckets to help clients deal with garbage and make food out of people. It can get overwhelming.

Enter the Hibiscus dashboard… 

Bart opens up Hibiscus and discovers good news and bad news. Good news is no projects are stuck. Bad news is he’s logged zero hours this month and needs to get cracking. Hibiscus prioritizes tasks by due date, telling Bart he needs to finish up a custom bucket for The Soylent Corporation (the company from the classic film and not one that  exists in real life) before it’s time to make wafers out of Edward G. Robinson. 

Plan Your Day, Week, and Month

Hibiscus helps Bart plan his day, week, and month. Tasks are automatically prioritized. Hibiscus even tracks billed hours and future revenue, presenting it at the dashboard level. Bart not only sees when the volume of work will be greater, he can look ahead and figure out where he can maybe carve out a half day off to play pickleball or go on a wilding. 

So Bart dives into his work by completing tasks, scheduling follow ups, and keeping workflows moving. As progress is made, Hibiscus updates the dashboard view…

Bart is elated. His happy client grinds up Edward G. Robinson confident that the non-usable parts will be captured in a high quality slop bucket. Bart takes comfort in his non-zero earnings picture, then moves on to his next task confident about making his deadlines and serving his clients.

Hibiscus helps Bart plan ahead with a 360° view of clients, projects, assets, tasks, and even financials. Can Trello do that? No. Asana? Freshbooks? No and no. To come close, you’d need to pay for at least two of those platforms and still wouldn’t get a consolidated view of mission critical information.

We built Hibiscus for freelancers, not enterprise level teams. Ours is a cost-effective application designed to help freelancers and small agencies run their personal businesses. Learn more about how Hibiscus can help you plan ahead.