Outright
This service automatically imports your paid invoices from Freshbooks and keeps track of your expenses, profits, estimated taxes, and can export to ANY financial or tax software. Did I mention this was FREE!? This site is one of those sites that will help you stay organized and help you keep your books in order, be that for your business or for personal use (I use it for both!).

Google Documents

In my mind there is no better company in the world than Google, I could devote a whole blog post to how awesome their company and all their services are (hey, that’s not that bad of an idea!). This has to be my favorite service of theirs (not including the search engine, GMail, or their advertisement services). This is your space online to store all of your documents. That may sound boring, but it’s awesome! The service is free (once again) and you can store, edit, view, and share ANY kind of document: PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, real text format, and plain text. Check it out! It’s really handy for helping clients with scripts or showing them your rate card, or any of another billion uses you can think of!

Launchy

Do you ever get tired of meandering through menus or digging through your dock to try to find that program? Well, no more. Launchy is a lightweight program that runs in the background and is activated by ALT+Space. When you activate it, you can launch any program on your computer just by typing in the name. How cool is that? This program saves me tons of time, I’m sure it will for you too!

Audacity

I’ve saved the best for last, especially for a blog about voice overs. Audacity is one of the best audio editors on the market, free or not. I use it when I’m not running windows (on Mac or Linux) and I love it! It has all the functionality of most audio editors and gives you some awesome capabilities when it comes to filters, importing, and exporting of audio. If I were to have a figurative voice over toolbelt, audacity would be on it. Try it out, what have you got to lose? It’s free!

Well, that’s not all the open source software in existence, but it’s definitely a recap of my favorites.

How do you go about obtaining the software that I mentioned? There’s a couple of ways. On some of the listings, I provided a link in the title of the software. Click on that, and away you go. If there is no link in the title of the software, just google it and make sure you download it from one of the top few links (to make sure you don’t infect yourself with a virus or anything.)

Happy Open Sourcing!

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The Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

This should help you figure out what to charge per hour to make ends meet. Keep in mind though, as a voice talent, you will work less than most other types of freelancers out there, unless you have more to offer your clients (script writing, audio editing, etc.) You also don’t want to charge more than you’re worth. Don’t worry, clients will be the first to tell you if your rate is too high, but by then it already be too late.

The more you offer, the more you get paid (that is, if you’re jack or jill of all trades and also master of all of them). This is true with your voice as well. If you have a very bland and uninteresting voice (which sometimes is called for) you probably won’t get called again. Practice and you won’t have to worry about it.

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