The Notion Income Tracker for Seeing Where Money Comes From

Expense tracking gets all the attention, and it's the less interesting half. Knowing you spent too much on software is mildly useful. Knowing that 70% of your income came from two of your eleven clients is the sort of thing that changes what you do next quarter.

The free Income Tracker logs earnings by source and date with automatic totals and monthly insights. It's simple by design, and it answers questions most people can only guess at.

Track by source, always

A monthly income total tells you whether things are going well. A monthly income total broken down by source tells you why, and what to do about it. The second requires exactly one extra field per entry, and it's the difference between a record and an insight.

• Client or customer name, so concentration is visible.
• Type of work, if you sell more than one thing.
• Channel, how the work arrived: referral, inbound, marketplace, repeat.
• Date received, not date invoiced. Those are different questions.

The concentration check

After three months, sort your income by client. If a single client represents more than a third of your revenue, that's a risk worth naming, however good the relationship is. Most freelancers who lose a big client are surprised, not because it was unpredictable, but because nobody was looking at the proportion.

One client at 40% of revenue isn't a great client. It's a great client and a business risk, at the same time.

Which channel actually produces money

Tracking the channel each piece of work came from tends to redistribute effort quickly. Marketing activities feel productive in proportion to how much work they take, not how much revenue they generate, and the two are frequently unrelated. Six months of channel data usually shows that something unglamorous, like past clients returning, quietly outperforms everything you were spending time on.

Seasonality shows up in year two

The most valuable output of an income tracker takes a year to arrive: knowing which months are reliably slow. Once you know, the slow month stops being a source of anxiety and becomes something you plan around, by saving ahead of it or by scheduling the work you never have time for.

Logging discipline

Log income when it arrives in the account, not when you invoice. Mixing the two makes both numbers meaningless. If you want to track what's invoiced but unpaid, that's the job of the Invoice dashboard, which is a separate and equally useful question.

Pair it with the free Expense Tracker for the whole picture, or step up to Business Finance for income, expenses, invoices and profit in one dashboard. Duplicate the Income Tracker and start with this month.