Freelancers are a great resource for businesses of any size. They help you easily scale up and down and enable you to be more efficient when you have short term needs. You can hire the right person for the duration of a project, instead of just hiring full time employees indefinitely when you don’t actually need them.
As more and more companies embrace freelancers, they’re realizing that manually managing freelancers is creating problems for their finance, HR, operations, & legal departments. Using tools like spreadsheets or other systems that don’t talk to each other leads to wasted time and money. And when you have complex manual processes you’re exposing yourself to a lot of risk as well. Miscommunications around freelancers can lead to big compliance issues.
Maybe you don’t even realize how badly you need a solution because you’re just used to operating this way. You might assume that onboarding and contracting freelancers — and making sure you’re compliant in the process — needs to take days or weeks. Or that having your teams chasing down invoices and payments is just another part of working with freelancers.
But a freelance management system (FMS) can do all of this for you. It can automate a lot of your manual tasks and eliminate back and forth between teams. And there are four main benefits that help you streamline your freelancer management.
Features you need in an FMS
One centralized view into your freelancer management
The biggest benefit to using an FMS is the removal of silos between your teams. If you’re not currently using one, you probably have your different departments all using their own processes and systems to track their portion of freelancer management.
This leads to a lot of inconsistencies in your information and a lot of unnecessary time spent resolving those inconsistencies. An FMS gives you one central view into freelancer management that all of your departments are using. Your contracts, billing, and timesheets are all housed in one central location. No more making sure departments are aligned and no more searching for the information you need.
Automated admin tasks and quicker payments
Another great benefit is automating your manual tasks like payments, contracts, and billing. Automating these tasks enables your teams to focus on more strategic work and improvements to your business.
Think of resource planning. By looking at your past freelancer trends you can be more strategic about hiring freelancers in advance when you know you’ll need them, instead of trying to play catchup. And if you have multiple freelancers with similar skill sets taking small projects, it will be easy to see where it might make sense to consolidate. You might currently have three freelancers doing ten hours a week of work each that could easily be one freelancer taking all three projects.
And late payments are one of the biggest complaints among freelancers. With automated payments your freelancers will always be paid on time. Being a good partner to your freelancers helps ensure your top freelance talent always wants to take your projects.
One-click hiring and skill tagging
Sourcing and hiring your freelancers can take up a lot of your HR team’s time. An FMS that has one click hiring and automated contracts can remove all of that back and forth that makes onboarding freelancers so cumbersome. Skill tagging is also a really useful feature to help keep your pool of freelancers organized. It makes it easier to quickly select the right freelancers for the right jobs so that you’re optimizing your freelance workforce and getting the best work every time.
Compliant sourcing and contracting
Worker classification needs to be done right when a contract is first generated. Trying to sort it out later as an afterthought is typically where companies land in trouble with compliance. You need an FMS that immediately classifies workers so they’re billed and taxed correctly from the start and you’re confident that you’re always compliant. If you manage freelancers in different countries, you’ll also need an FMS that takes local and global compliance into account. Having an FMS handle this for you helps you more confidently manage your global workforce.
Ready for smoother operations and a better freelance workforce?
As more and more top talent turns to freelancing, being able to successfully leverage the contingent workforce will be key to success for businesses of any size. Worksome has all of these features, as well as a marketplace for when you need to find new freelancers.
Click here to request a demo and learn more about how Worksome can help you manage your contingent workforce.