Disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you.
The Accounting System I Recommend
I’m a freelancer who has sent thousands of invoices, logged thousands of hours, filed taxes for over a decade, tracked years of expenses, and earned $1.5 million in income since 2014. There is one accounting system I recommend freelancers use, and it’s the one I subscribe to myself, Harpoon. As a former marketing agency owner, I’ve used a variety of different accounting systems. I’ve also worked with accounting firms. Which exposed me to a variety of bookkeeping software for small businesses and enterprise systems. Years ago, I was even paid to provide feedback on a prominent business accounting system. After everything, Harpoon is still my go-to system. I love Harpoon.
It has a free trial. It not only provides the basic functions that freelancers need, like invoicing and collecting payment. It offers many other powerful functions I wanted in a freelancing accounting system. Many of its functions I couldn’t go without, but I didn’t know I needed them until I had the system. And was using Harpoon.
I Wrote a Book Called Path of the Freelancer
I’m the author of Path of the Freelancer, an actionable guide to flourishing in freelancing. So many of the ideas in this book are actually built into the Harpoon system.
Harpoon’s Invoicing System
In my experience, Harpoon is the top invoicing system tailored for freelancers. I’ve used many systems as a freelancer, and this is the one I’ve landed on and have been on for years. It’s a significant upgrade from basic invoice templates, spreadsheets, and anything else that might make accounting a nightmare for you as a freelancer. Harpoon simplifies payments through Stripe integration. It automates late payment reminders and recurring billing, freeing you to focus on your work.
Additional Benefits of Harpoon
Additional benefits of Harpoon include the ability to get paid easily, with quick branded invoices and simple client payment via Stripe, and automatic reminders for overdue invoices. This is huge. It saves me a ton of time. There are also automatic recurring invoices, which make ongoing billing much easier to manage. I don’t have to remember to send that invoice. Harpoon does it for me. It includes professional templates which are customizable and branded. It gives you a payment history of who’s paid and when. It has integrated reporting and comprehensive income tracking by client and project if you need that. The invoice creation process is simple, and you can create and send an invoice and get paid within minutes.
For freelancers seeking to streamline billing and secure timely payments, Harpoon is my recommended solution.
Forecasting
Harpoon is the first web-based accounting app with forecasting for freelancers that I found. Imagine having a high degree of certainty about your financial future as a freelancer. You can get a sense of how much you’re likely to earn in the months to come based on your invoicing history and other factors. Forecasting is a powerful tool to alleviate our anxiety about the unknown. It’s why, in my book Path of the Freelancer, I recommend building systems to prevent what we fear from happening. And Harpoon gives us visibility into what we can anticipate. When I first started freelancing, I was doing many of these things on spreadsheets just to create that type of visibility. When I found Harpoon and saw that it did it, I was ecstatic.
This helped me focus my efforts to grow my freelancing business into what it is now, a multi-year consistent pattern of having more work than I have time to do. After switching to Harpoon, I no longer have to maintain these spreadsheets because the software provides this type of forecasting, and it does it in cool and unexpected ways, many of them better than what I was doing on my spreadsheet.
Dashboard
Arpoon also has a dashboard with helpful quick reference numbers to see where you’re at with your income for the year and how much it expects you to earn by the year’s end. You can then dive in deeper with theiruler system, which breaks down your revenue by month for the remainder of the year. You can see where that money is coming from and how likely it is to arrive, whether it’s under contract or just anticipated. Their scheduling tool shows you how much money you should have at this point in the year and how much you actually have, revealing how far behind you are on your revenue goal for the year.
Breakdown by Month and Client
This report gives you a breakdown by month and by client to see how much money you can expect to earn, and which clients it will come from, based on the income you’ve made and the recurring invoices you’ve set up. Once you know how much income you’ll earn based on what you’ve already collected and what you have set up to invoice, you’ll see the gap between that total and the goal you’ve set for the year. As the year unfolds, each month adjusts up or down based on what you need to do to catch up, or whether you have enough slack to take some time off.
I’ve never seen forecasting software like this for freelancers. Usually, this type of visibility and reporting is reserved for more sophisticated enterprise accounting systems. In this case, it’s available for freelancers like you and me, which is incredible.
Expenses and Useful Financial Reporting
As a freelancer, your expenses will likely be quite minimal. That’s one of the great benefits of freelancing. But when it comes to taxes, you’ll need to tally whatever expenses you do have and report on them. Harpoon allows you to automatically download transactions from your bank, import them via a bank export file, or add and edit them manually. These expenses can be tied to clients and projects. If you need a report on the profitability of a project, this is super helpful, especially if you’re an agency with multiple people working on a project and logging time.
Reports
Like any accounting system, Harpoon provides a range of reports, most of which I never use, but they’re there for those who need them and have different types of freelancing businesses. Generally, I’ll use the annual profit and loss statement, but they also have the following reports: expenses, time sheets, invoice payments, other income, accounts, aging, invoice details, tax summary, mileage, project summary, and lead sources. I’ll take a look at these from time to time to see where my income is coming from. These reports are in addition to the reports available in each section, like clients, projects, and theuler. So there are a ton of reports and ways to look at the information to help you make sense of your freelancing business and move it forward.
Time Tracking
If you track time, Harpoon allows for low-friction time tracking. There’s a web interface, and there’s also a widget for Apple Mac computers. Time tracked can be assigned to clients and projects, which allows for helpful insights and reporting around capacity and profitability.
Other Accounting Functions
One benefit of Harpoon is how much of an all-in-one web software it is for freelancers. It has a variety of other accounting functions and does much more than the things I use it for. These include predictive project budgeting, responsive expense budgeting, advanced team management (particularly for agencies), and hundreds of integrations including Zapier, Mailchimp, Google Docs, and Stripe. Harpoon is a great app for freelancers, and it’s made my freelancing work so much easier and better. The more visibility I have into what’s ahead, and the less I have to deal with getting paid, the better. As long as I’m freelancing, I’ll be using Harpoon. If you’re a freelancer, I recommend you consider it too.
Harpoon’s Secret Sauce
Here’s the secret sauce of what makes Harpoon stand out. I’m going to quote Simon Sinek here. The goal is not to sell what we have to people who need it. The goal is to do business with people who believe what we believe. My first book, Path of the Freelancer, is a blueprint for freelancing success. If you want to make six figures working part-time, this is how I recommend doing it. Throughout the pages, I mapped out my proven habits and systems for mastering the business of one, freelancing. Many of these were systems I was managing manually using spreadsheets and other software. But when I found Harpoon, I didn’t just find a tool that captured these functions. I discovered a company that embodied these values and this vision.
Less Accounting
In the book, I actually talk about another system called Less Accounting, and I like it for similar reasons. But it ended up getting bought out, and when that happened, I decided to compare the systems. I ended up moving to Harpoon. Less Accounting is still out there and still seems to be a good system, but Harpoon had the secret sauce. Simply put, the features I needed resulted from the core values I shared with Harpoon.
Harpoon’s Philosophy
This is most clear in Harpoon’s philosophy, a set of four rules that guide the company’s design of the software: set a financial goal, plan your revenue, bill your clients intelligently, and control your expenses. These rules translate so closely from my book Path of the Freelancer that it’s as if they read the book and used it as a guide to develop the software. In reality, we both discovered something that mattered and was effective in growing a freelance business. That’s great because it means their shared beliefs will guide the evolution of the software and continue making it better for independent contractors. For me, Harpoon is not just software as a service, but a business partnership I couldn’t imagine going without.
Pricing and Free Trial
The marketing agency package is $99, while the freelancer option is $19 a month. This was accurate as of July 31, 2025, so check current pricing before you sign up. If you’re still not sure Harpoon is a good fit, they offer a 14-day free trial.
Path of the Freelancer
Are you a freelancer struggling to get clients and sustain an income? Check out Jason Mononttoya’s book, Path of the Freelancer, where he provides the blueprint for mastering freelancing and sustaining a business of one. Start working toward a six-figure freelancing income.
