Automate Your Freelance Income and Expense Tracking with Google Sheets
By: Erica Martin
Tags: Work, Analytics, Freelancing, Writing, Money

How to Track Your Freelance Writing Income and Expenses

As you complete projects for clients and have different expenses come in, enter the information in the appropriate sheets. Then you can start entering the different formulas:

To calculate your total freelance writing income, go to the Freelance Writing Income worksheet and type “Total” in one of the cells below the freelance writing income information you’ve started entering. In the cell below the amounts you’ve entered type “=sum(“ without the quotes. Google Sheets may automatically highlight the totals you’ve entered. If it does, just type the closing parentheses. Now you should see the total you’ve earned from freelance work so far. As you finish more work, you can go to the “Insert” menu and choose “Row above” to enter additional rows above the Total row. As you do, the total will automatically update.

Screenshot taken by the author.

You’ll use the same process to figure out how much you’ve spent on freelance writing expenses. Once you’ve got these two totals, enter them in the Main Worksheet. The process is easy. Enter them so they automatically update as you put in new information.

The only extra thing you may want to add to your freelance writing expenses worksheet is a column called Category. I’ll explain how to do that in the next section

Here are the steps:

Go to the main worksheet. In the cell next to “Freelance Writing Income,” type just an equals sign. Now go to the Freelance writing income worksheet and click on the cell that has the total. It should automatically add the cell reference to the Main worksheet in the space you typed the equals sign in. You may have to type a quotation mark to end the cell reference, then type an end parentheses. Once you leave that cell, the total automatically shows up there and update every time you update the Freelance Writing Income worksheet. Do the same with the Freelance Writing expenses worksheet. In space for the total, type an equal sign, then highlight the cells that have the income and expenses, if they’re not already highlighted. If they are, close the formula. The difference between income and expenses should automatically show up. It will change as you enter new information.

Here’s a screenshot of what your expenses worksheet would look like before you enter any information:

Screenshot taken by the author

Optional Step

If you chose to add a Category column in your freelance writing expenses sheet, here’s how to set it up:

Go to the Data menu and choose “Data Validation.” Choose “List of Items,” and make sure “Show Dropdown List in Cell,” is checked. Type the categories of your different expenses. Some ideas could be Website hosting, social media, Research Organization, and Freelance Worker. As you enter different expenses, choose the appropriate category from the dropdown list.

How to figure out the totals for your different categories:

List your categories in a column on your spreadsheet. In the next column, type this formula: =sumif([range of cells listing at least one instance of your expense], [cell that contains at least one instance of your category], [range of cells containing the total]). In the square brackets, you’re going to add cell ranges or cell references mentioned. Here’s an example of one of mine:

Screenshot taken by the author

In this example, the formula tells Google Sheets to look in range B2 to B30 for an example of what’s going to be listed under my category, then look in B2 for an actual instance of that category, then look in C2:C30 for an instance of the amount. Here’s what’s it returned for the amount it found:

Screenshot taken by the author

The range B2 to B30 contains the name of the website hosting company I use, 1 and 1. Cell B2 contains the first instance of that name. And the range C2 to C30 contains the amount of that charge, $14. Since the charge occurred twice in the example data I put in, Google sheets added them together to get $28.

Here’s a screenshot showing what your spreadsheet would look like after your entered the information:

Screenshot taken by the author.

That’s how you set up a Google workbook that keeps track of your freelance writing income and expenses. If you do this for the entire year, you’ll have all the information you need next year about how much you made from different sources and how much you spent on different freelance writing business expenses. This makes it easier to itemize your deductions if you spend enough to deduct your business expenses on your taxes.