In Your Shoes: the Freelancer and the Solopreneur

In Your Shoes, No. 6  ·  For: freelancers, consultants and solopreneurs  ·  Reading time: 5 min

The 204 hours.

You are the salesperson, the delivery team, the accountant and the person who answers the phone. You cannot hand the operations to anyone, because there is nobody to hand them to.

What a 2026 survey found

Smallpdf surveyed 397 freelancers in 2026. This is a vendor survey and the answers are self-reported, so read it as a signal.

• Freelancers lose an average of 204 hours a year to admin and paperwork, even with AI in their toolkit.
• 70% use AI on admin tasks. 65% use it on the work clients pay for.
• Yet 48% say AI has done little to reduce their admin. Among solopreneurs the figure is 58%.
• The biggest single time eater is formatting documents, named by 38%.
• More than half say admin costs them income, nearly 6,800 US dollars a year on average. One in seven has thought about quitting because of it.

Show and tell: real survey data. Note the pattern: the tool gets used, the week does not change.

Why AI did not fix it

Drafting a proposal faster does not remove the time spent converting formats, managing versions, chasing approval and following up on late payments. AI speeds up one step. The admin is a chain of steps, spread over several tools that do not talk to each other.

A weekly routine that works with any tool

• Monday, 15 minutes: your five numbers. Cash in the bank, new enquiries, calls booked, invoices unpaid, hours on paid work. Write them down, ask your AI tool what stands out, then check it against your own figures.
• Wednesday, 20 minutes: the follow-up sweep. Every quote, invoice and lead that has gone quiet gets a next step. Let AI draft the message. You read every line, and you send it.
• Friday, 20 minutes: the review. Which hours made money? Which did not? Move one operations task off your plate next week: a template, a rule or a no.
• Once, for an hour: build your three templates. Proposal, invoice and follow-up. Formatting is the biggest drain, so fix it once.

A safety note

Do not paste client names, contracts or financial details into an AI tool unless the tool is approved for that and you understand its settings. Use a short description instead. A person always checks the result.

Why we are building it

For freelancers and solopreneurs, we are building a companion kit: an assistant set up once inside the AI tool you already use, an Excel tracker, a weekly routine and a plain-language safe-use guide. We are starting with the free Basic tier of Microsoft Copilot, because that is what most people have.

Have data? Let us talk