Jennifer Welsh

I’ve created this Airtable template myself for my own business over several months of work and finesse. I hope it proves helpful for you! I’m providing them here for free because I like to help other freelancers find information and be successful.

If these Airtable templates have helped you organize your freelance business, please consider buying me a coffee or some lunch with a donation through my Ko-Fi account.

Donations help me keep these templates free for everyone and let me spend more time creating them, troubleshooting with you, and making these resources for you to put my system into practice for yourself.

Airtable is like Excel or Google Sheets on steroids and specifically built to deal with text. If you find yourself typing a lot of text into a spreadsheet and not calculating many functions, you should probably be using Airtable instead.

I love Airtable because you can do pretty much everything you need to do in the free version. I use the Pro version for the apps and automation, but these don’t change the bases’ basic structure or how useful they can be. The paid version adds a few extra features (like time tracking) that I like and other apps that help give me a bird’s eye view of my business health.

There are three basic things to know about Airtable. The base is the collection of tabs of information. Each tab has different fields, and the tabs are all linked to each other within the base. Each tab also has various views (on the left of the web page) that you can play with to ensure you see everything you want to see, the way you want to see it, without any extra info. I’m partial to the Kanban (Trello-like card view) and calendar views for upcoming deadlines (pro lets you see multiple dates in the calendar view).

Here is the latest version of my Airtable database template. To use the template, make an Airtable account for free here, then click here > Airtable database template, You should see a “Copy Base” button in the upper right-hand corner to save a copy to your new account to play around with.

Nothing! You can use this Airtable template to its full capabilities on the free version of the software. I created my Airtable templates and workflow with the free version of the app.

But, I currently use the pro version ($20/month — see feature comparison). There are two main features I use: Apps and Automations.

Apps

Apps are small extensions of Airtable within your base that give it more functionalities. I use them to analyze the data in my sheets to tell me:

• How healthy my business is
• Keep my assignments and due dates front of mind
• Help me track the billable hours I’ve spent on various projects
• Analyze how diverse my sources are

Automations

Automations are small pieces of coding you can create in Airtable to tell it to do things. A small number of automations are included with the free plan, so play around with these!

• Say you have applied for a new opportunity. When you change the date applied, Airtable will automatically change the status of that opportunity to “waiting to hear”
• Send you emails or slack messages when deadlines are coming up or when invoices are coming due
• Automations help me track my Hours Worked by creating a new entry every time I change the time worked on a given assignment

The other paid feature I use is the ability to include multiple date entries in a calendar view. You can fake it by creating multiple views for different dates and adding their calendars to your Google Calendar by its URL.

Let’s take a quick walkthrough of the different sheets and what I use them for. You don’t need to use all the sheets! Delete the ones that don’t seem relevant to your work.

• Publications — Each publication has many different editors, but they all share some common information — like pitching details. I also here include areas for tracking what I’ve pitched to each publication, what’s actually gotten placed there, invoice and contract details, and a spot for assessing any current publications I’m writing for by scoring them from 1-5 on their pay, prestige, passion, and pain in the ass factor, adding up to a client score out of 20.
• Editors — Editors move publications all the time, so I have these two as separate bases. I can also include specific details about each editor’s beats and story types they take, and what they like and don’t like, and interactions I’ve had with them in the past. And then, in the future, if they move publications, you can change that easily.
• Opportunities — Here is my list of open jobs, gigs, or potential clients to contact and how I track them through the process. If I’m gathering information to review and act on later or waiting to hear back or need a reminder to follow up, that happens here in the Opportunities tab.
• Sources — This tab is still a work in progress for me but can guide how a sheet might work for you. It’s linked to assignments, so you can keep track of what sources you used for what stories. The manual need to regularly update the contacted dates isn’t working great for me, so I’m not sure how useful this will really be. However, I do have it set up to analyze my sources’ diversity, so that could be useful information.
• Ideas — This tab is where I gather string on new story ideas. My ideas usually start with a sentence or a nugget, or a headline draft. I build from there, adding source ideas, links, and draft a pitch. I link this to the publications and editors I want to pitch it to. Once accepted, I actually make a new entry in “assignments” instead of keeping it in here; I may want to revisit an idea and turn it into another pitch or re-pitch it in a different format if the assignment takes a different turn once I work on it with an editor.
• Assignments — Anything I’m going to be putting through the writing and editing process goes here, even if they get batched together in one invoice or are billed hourly. This tab is the heart of the work tracking part of this base — it’s designed to ensure you know what needs to be done for each of your assignments at any given time with just one glance. I have formulas here to calculate the actual hourly rate based on billable time spent (I use the Pro feature Time Tracking app to do that in Airtable, but you can also take this info from your favorite time tracking app or track it manually).
• Invoicing — Keeping track of invoices is every freelancers’ nightmare. Make it easier by tracking which assignments are on what invoice alongside the editor’s contact info and the invoice’s status. You can even set up automation to email you if it’s getting close to the invoice’s due date!
• Income — This tab gives you a monthly view of how much you’re invoicing for, how much you’re getting paid every month, and even what your hourly rate for your work that month was.
• Goals – Setting goals is integral to your freelance business. This sheet helps you set and track your goals to ensure you’re on track. This is totally flexible, so you can use it to track days off, sending X number of pitches, even make sure you’re meeting your revenue goals.
• Quarterly Tracking — Setting aside time to review your business health and check in on your goals can really help keep your business moving forward. At the beginning of the year, I created a record for each quarter, and I assign it any goals I want to reach during that period. On the scheduled date, I’ll go through my check-in checklist to update my bases, check on my business health, and make sure I’m moving toward my goals.
• Hours Worked — This is really the only sheet where being on the Pro plan makes it work. Here an Airtable automation adds a new item when I’ve updated the “hours worked” field on any assignment. This creates a running log of what I’ve worked on each day of the week, how many billed hours I did each day (I need to manually put the length at the end of each work session), and gives a quick and dirty calculation of how much I made, given the hourly rate on the assignment (which will go down as more time is tracked to it, so best to not look at those numbers until the assignment is finished).

If you’re just jumping into this base for the first time, start with the Assignments base.

Add in any assignments you’re currently working on and fill out as many fields in the record as you can. When it says to link a record, click through and enter whatever that record is for — it might be your editor’s name and contact info, the publications’ name, or the associated invoice you’ll be sending to get payment. Entering that info will create records in those tabs for you to go fill out later. As you go through pitch call emails or come across editors on Twitter, add them to your tabs. Take some time to go through your recent emails and previous assignments and add that information in there too.