With over 59 million people in the US freelancing this year, chances are that you’re currently working with, or plan to work with, flexible workers. When you do, you’ll quickly realize that managing and paying freelancers is vastly different than how you oversee your full-time team. Instead of having a set schedule with set salaries, freelancers work on a variety of projects when and where they are needed most. Paying your freelancers comes with its own set of challenges when you realize the different classification and tax laws associated with 1099 freelancers.
Here are some ways you can make sure your team doesn’t end up buried with spreadsheets, desktop folders, and tax-related paperwork when it comes to onboarding, managing, and paying your freelancers.
Streamline your onboarding
Onboarding can be one of the most complex steps when it comes to hiring freelancers for your business. Unlike full-time employees, freelancer onboarding can be an on-going process. A great onboarding process protects companies from compliance and classification errors and products a quick way for workers to enter all of their important background and payment information.
The onboarding process for freelancers can be overwhelming and time-consuming if you aren’t prepared. Without an organized, streamlined onboarding system, you can easily slow down projects, end up with hours of unnecessary administrative work, and even compromise tax compliance.
Organize your project details
When it comes to assigning and managing projects for freelancers, you can once again find yourself in uncharted territory. While your full-time employees have on-going work during their 9-5, freelancers work on set projects that usually have an hourly or set project budget.
Having the ability to organize and streamline the project assignment process will eliminate the back and forth hassle that will accompany trying to accomplish this goal with emails, phone calls, spreadsheets, and other painfully manual processes. Having a freelancer management platform where you can assign projects, update budgets, and track invoices is going to save you time and a whole lot of hassle.
Having one system of record for all of your project details keeps your freelancers on track and lets your entire team have full visibility into what is being worked on and when it will be completed. Without a defined process in place for managing freelancers, companies can find themselves saddled with tremendous administrative burdens and major compliance risks. In addition, a lack of structure makes it easy for things to fall through the cracks. Something no one wants when there are project deadlines to be met.
A freelancer management system serves as a system of record in place to keep track of this workforce and guarantees visibility and standardization of freelancer contracts, availability, projects, and invoices.
Find experts for payroll
Current management systems like Workday and Oracle, or payroll and PEO providers like ADP, Paychex, Gusto, Tri-net, or JustWorks are just not designed for efficient or compliant freelancer management and payments. When freelancers are hired, they need to be classified and on-boarded in a much different way in order to track freelancer tax forms and monitor employment risk.
Since freelancers mostly perform task-based work, their pay schedules can also be most more irregular. That’s why you should leave freelancer payments up to the experts. By choosing a freelancer management system with integrated payroll, you’ll know you have secure on-boarding of talent and administration of all paychecks to ensure that talent is paid on time.
