As a freelance grant writer, or freelancer in general, are you keeping track of your time?

One of the biggest flaws I see is that freelance grant writers don’t keep track of their time.

Why is tracking your time so important?

Because our time is our most valuable asset.

What Happens When Freelancers Don’t Track Your Time

When Freelance Grant Writers don’t track your time, you underestimate how much time that the following takes:

• Writing grants
  • How much time to write a foundation grant
  • How much time to write a federal grant
  • How much time to write a state grant
  • How much time to write a Letter of Inquiry
• Finding grant prospects 
• Meetings with clients
• Emails with clients
• Talking to funders
• Working on financials
• Marketing
• Industry updates
• Administration
• And so much more…

And what happens when you don’t accurately count or track your time?

According to our friends over at Global Development Solutions, who conduct an annual Pricing Survey among grant professionals (2023), YOU don’t get paid for all your work!

This is SO dangerous because if you don’t get paid for your work, then you are not able to sustain a business.

You need to know how much time that things take you to do. 

How to Track Your Time

We recommend using time tracking tools like Toggl. This can be helpful because it is digital and you can see where all your time is going at a click of a button.

Inside the Grant Professional Mentorship, we like to use time tracking tools so we can compare how much time we are spending on:

• Communicating with your team
• Admin (invoicing, finances, email)
• Sales calls
• Marketing
• Writing grants/ service work
• Scaling with Training, On-Demand Courses, and Coaching
• Getting coached

Then we can look at our finances and compare it to our time to figure out business decisions.

This can happen at a click of a button. Inside the Grant Professional Mentorship, we show you how to do a comparison of time vs. revenue to make solid business decisions in scaling your grant writing business!

So for example, you can create a “Client” inside Toggl that is called “Administrative”. From there, you can create projects that are connected to the Client “Administrative,” such as Finances, Invoicing, Emails. 

When you are creating invoices in Toggl, you would select the project “Invoices” under the Client “Administrative”.  (Invoicing >>Administrative).

You would hit the record button when doing your invoicing so you can run a report at the end of the month or quarter. 

In this way, you could run reports each month, quarterly, and annually. 

You can get a graph that breaks down each of  your larger areas of work, such as:

• Communicating with your team
• Admin (invoicing, finances, email)
• Sales calls
• Marketing
• Writing grants/ service work
• Scaling with Training, On-Demand Courses, and Coaching
• Getting coached

But because you create projects under each client, you can also see what exactly in those clients or categories are taking you the most time. 

How Tracking Time Helps You Make Business Decisions

This is brilliant, because you will be able to start making decisions.

Maybe you see that it takes you two hours every month to create invoices. You would try and find solutions to streamlining this; i.e.

• Eliminate
• Delegate
• Automate
• Pause

Run through each of these items and ask how you can make any of these tasks more efficient. 

You can’t eliminate invoices or pause them. 

But you could possibly delegate creating and sending invoices to a virtual assistant. And you know it should take no more than two hours. 

Or better yet, you could check and see if your payment processor can automatically create invoices and email them to clients each month. 

Track Hourly, but Don’t Charge Hourly

Just because you are tracking your hours doesn’t mean you should charge hourly. But tracking your hours WILL help you include all your time into your costs.

You can think about a lot of your time as a freelance grant writer as indirect time. Think of a grant that has direct costs and indirect costs. The indirect costs often include admin time, utilities, etc. I want you to think of this as where you include sales call time, marketing, admin, and more. 

You need to include this time into your pricing. 

You can charge hourly, but there are cons to pricing hourly. These cons are that the more you get to know your clients, the quicker you start writing grants. What this equates to is the more experienced and valuable you get to your clients, your price reduces. Plus, when submitting hours, your clients tend to nitpick and don’t understand the overhead elements.

We instead recommend charging packages or retainer pricing. 

Package – You will charge a specific amount for a specific scope of work in a short amount of time.

Retainer – You will charge a set monthly rate each month for deliverables over a duration of time. 

When you track hourly, you will be able to understand (on average) how much time it takes you to complete tasks. This will help you with your overall pricing.

This will also help you when you want to onboard a virtual assistant and/or junior grant writer in your business. 

Tune in today to listen to this podcast. 

Links Mentioned in the Podcast

Grant Professional Mentorship

Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts

“Every time I listen to Holly’s show, I learn something” <– If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing my show! This helps me support more people — just like you — move toward writing higher quality grants without overwhelm, and to start and grow successful grant writing businesses! Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let me know what you loved most about the episode!

Also, if you haven’t done so already, follow the Grant Writing & Funding podcast. I’m adding a bunch of bonus episodes to the feed and, if you’re not following, there’s a good chance you’ll miss out. Follow now!“

This Podcast Episode is Sponsored by: