Sample project: a bills tracker I built in Excel and Google Sheets for a fictional business.
Change one date and everything updates: the row colours (green = paid, orange = due within 2 days, red = overdue), the totals, the pie chart and the payment rate.
All data is fictional.
Which would you rather see in a monthly report: the pie chart of what's still owed, or the payment rate bar? I'd love your thoughts.
Blue means one thing here: the range you are looking at.
The value chart is a row of thin gray bars, and only the selected date range fills in blue. You read the period that matters and keep the months around it as context.
The phone carries the same chart above the holdings list. Each coin gets its own small bar chart between the name and the amount, so you can scan the whole portfolio for movement without opening a single coin.
Trading screens get busy fast. This one stays light and calm, so the numbers lead: total value, realized and unrealized P&L and open positions, all on one screen.
Built myself a little command center for my freelance work this week. It’s called Bench.
Contra handles the contracts and payments, but my day-to-day was scattered across Contra chats, Gmail, my calendar, Notion, and a notes app. So I pulled it all into one place:
• A dashboard showing what needs me today: unread messages, overdue tasks, past-due invoices, leads that have gone quiet
• Each project gets its own page with scope, deliveries, tasks, links, and the full message thread from Contra and email
• A pipeline for leads, including a “Ghosted” column, because we’ve all been there
• A time tracker for the hourly stuff
• It syncs with my Contra projects and invoices every morning
Curious how other freelancers here keep track of everything. Spreadsheets? Notion? Pure chaos?
A calculator that runs by itself is a clever way to show the product without asking anyone to read. Watching a price turn into an invoice explains the value instantly.