The board
I have been a freelancer and a consultant for 21 years, and for most of that time I have also hired freelancers of my own, so I sit on both sides of this. I still had no clean picture of where the money went every month until I built a dedicated board in monday.com to track it. I set up Numbers columns that multiply cost per hour by hours spent on each project automatically, so instead of trawling through old invoices at the end of the month I could see the total sitting there at a glance.
I built it because I manage freelancers and remote workers across different time zones, and guessing at spend had started to bother me more than the actual bills did. I wanted one place that told me the truth without me having to go looking for it.
The category
Once the numbers were sitting in front of me instead of buried across separate email threads, one line stood out straight away. I was paying an outsourced designer somewhere between 400 and 600 dollars a month for recurring business images, social tiles, blog graphics, the occasional deck. Nothing dramatic happened in any single month; that was the point. It was the repetition that got me, the same category showing up on the board every four weeks like clockwork, and I started asking myself whether that specific slice of work still needed a person on the other end of it.