Freelancer Runway

What is Runway?#

Runway is a financial dashboard built specifically for freelancers and independent contractors. It answers one question that every freelancer needs to know: if all my work dried up today, how long could I survive?

That number — your runway — is the foundation of every smart financial decision you make as a freelancer. Too short and you take bad-fit clients out of desperation. Long enough and you negotiate from confidence, say no to low-quality work, and invest in yourself.

Beyond the runway number, Runway helps you invoice clients, track expenses, manage your sales pipeline, model financial scenarios, and understand your business health — all in one place.

Your First 5 Minutes

Getting accurate numbers takes less than five minutes. Here's what to do when you first open the dashboard:

1. 1

   Enter your cash on hand

   Open the Financial Inputs widget and enter the total liquid cash across all accounts — checking, savings, anywhere you can access funds quickly.

2. 2

   Enter your monthly burn rate

   Add your total monthly expenses: rent, software subscriptions, equipment payments, insurance — everything you pay regularly to keep the lights on.

3. 3

   Add income sources

   Click "Add Income" on the Financial Inputs widget and add any ongoing income: a retainer client, a recurring project, part-time work. Only add reliable, recurring income.

4. 4

   Read your runway

   The Runway Clock now shows your baseline — how many months you can sustain yourself at this rate. Everything else in the app helps you understand and extend that number.

Key Concepts

Runway Clock#

The Runway Clock is the centerpiece of the dashboard — a large, clear display of how many months your current financial position can sustain you. It's designed to be glanceable: open the dashboard and immediately know where you stand.

The clock shows more than just the headline number. Below it you'll see:

• Cash on hand — your total liquid reserves
• Net monthly burn — expenses minus current income
• Pipeline potential — additional months your weighted pipeline could add
• Reimbursements owed — additional months from client-billable expenses that haven't been paid back yet

The color of the clock shifts with urgency: green for healthy runway (>6 months), yellow for caution (3–6 months), and red for critical (<3 months).

Burn Chart#

The Burn Chart turns the abstract runway number into a visual projection. It plots your estimated cash balance over time as a line graph — showing a curve that dips toward zero at the point your runway ends.

This visualization does something a number alone can't: it gives you a sense of the slope. A gentle slope means you have time. A steep drop creates urgency. A flat or rising line means you're in a great position.

Financial Inputs#

The Financial Inputs widget is where you update your core numbers: cash on hand and monthly burn rate. Changes here instantly recalculate everything on the dashboard — the runway clock, burn chart, income simulator, and more.

You can also manage your income sources here — ongoing retainers, recurring project work, or any predictable monthly income. Each source can be toggled active or inactive, which lets you model scenarios like losing a key client without permanently deleting the data.

Income Simulator#

The Income Simulator is a "what if I earned more?" calculator. Enter a hypothetical additional monthly income amount and instantly see how many extra months it would add to your runway.

Use it to evaluate specific decisions in real time:

• What would taking on a $2,000/month retainer do to my runway?
• How much would raising my rates by $500/month change things?
• Is it worth hustling for one more client this month?

The simulator does not save any data — it's a scratchpad. Use Scenarios to save and compare hypothetical states.

Income Patterns#

Income Patterns shows a visual breakdown of your income sources as a chart. Each active income source appears as a segment, letting you see at a glance how diversified your income is.

Income diversification is one of the most important risk factors for freelancers. A single client making up 80% of your income is fragile — one email can drop your runway from 12 months to 3. This chart makes concentration risk immediately visible.

Pipeline Card#

The Pipeline Card shows a summary of your active sales pipeline and its potential impact on your runway. It displays the total pipeline value, the weighted value (adjusted for probability), and how many additional months the weighted value represents at your current burn rate.

A $15,000 weighted pipeline with a $5,000/month burn rate adds 3 potential months to your runway. This number shows on the Runway Clock as the “pipeline potential” figure.

Goal Mode#

Goal Mode opens the Goal Calculator — a tool that works backwards from a target runway to tell you exactly how much additional monthly income you need.

Set a runway goal (e.g., “I want 12 months of runway”) and the calculator shows:

• How much additional monthly income would hit that goal
• How much you need to reduce monthly burn to hit it
• How much additional cash you'd need to save to hit it

It turns a vague goal into a concrete number — exactly the kind of clarity that drives action.

Tax Set Aside#

The Tax Set Aside widget tracks your estimated tax obligation. Based on the income you've entered and your tax rate (configured in Settings), it calculates how much of your cash should be reserved for taxes and compares that against what you currently have set aside.

This solves one of the most common financial mistakes freelancers make: spending money that's technically already owed to the government. When tax season arrives with a $12,000 bill and only $3,000 in savings, the consequences are severe.

Dry Months#

Dry Months highlights historical months where your income was zero or negative — months where expenses exceeded income. These are the lean months that erode your runway.

Patterns in dry months tell an important story. Do you regularly have a slow January? A weak summer? Knowing your historical dry periods lets you build cash reserves in advance and avoid scrambling when a predictably slow month arrives.

Alerts Banner#

The Alerts Banner appears at the top of the dashboard when your runway drops below a threshold you define in Settings. It's an early warning system — designed to surface urgency before a crisis, not during one.

Both thresholds are configurable in Settings → Alert Thresholds. If the banner is always showing, your thresholds may be set too high — adjust them to match your personal risk tolerance.

Invoices#

Create and send professional invoices to clients. Each invoice supports:

• Multiple line items with descriptions, quantities, and rates
• Tax and discounts applied at the invoice level
• Status tracking — Draft, Sent, Paid, Overdue
• Shareable client portal — send a secure link; no account required for your client to view
• Send via email — one click opens your email client pre-filled with the invoice details and a portal link
• PDF download — print or save any invoice as a PDF directly from the browser
• Duplicate any invoice to quickly create a similar one

Invoices past their due date are automatically flagged as Overdue. Use the New Invoice floating button on the dashboard for the fastest path to a new invoice.

AI Line Item Drafting

When creating a new invoice, open the AI Draft panel and describe the work you did in plain English. Runway uses AI to generate professional line items — descriptions, quantities, and rates — that you can review and confirm before they're added to the invoice.

Sending an Invoice

Open any invoice and click Send Invoice. A dialog appears with the recipient email pre-filled from the client record — edit it if needed, then click Open in Email.

Your default email client opens with the subject, body (line items, totals, due date), and a link to the client portal all pre-written. Hit send from there. The invoice status automatically updates to Sent and the sent date is recorded.

Recurring Invoices#

Set up invoices that generate automatically on a repeating schedule. Ideal for retainer clients or any work with a fixed billing cycle.

Configure once with the amount, billing frequency, client, and start date. Runway handles the rest — generating a new invoice each cycle without manual intervention.

Time Tracker#

The Time Tracker lets you track hours as you work and convert them directly into invoice line items — no manual calculations or copy-pasting rates.

From the /time page you can:

• Start a live timer — assign a client, description, and hourly rate, then hit Start. A running clock appears on the page.
• Log past time manually — add entries after the fact with a start time, end time, and duration.
• Mark entries billable or non-billable — only billable entries appear in the unbilled summary.
• View by date or client — switch between views to see where your time is going.
• Add to invoice — select any unbilled entry and attach it to an existing invoice as a line item, or create a new invoice from a group of entries.

Time entries linked to an invoice show the invoice number next to them so you can always trace what was billed and when.

Clients#

Your client directory keeps all client information in one place and automatically calculates a health score (A–F) for each client based on their payment behavior.

The health score is calculated from payment consistency, average days to pay, and invoice history. Use it to spot clients who are chronically late before they become a cashflow problem. At-risk clients also appear in the Reports page.

Pipeline#

Track potential work through a sales workflow with five stages:

Each opportunity has a value, a probability percentage, an expected close date, and optionally a linked client. Won opportunities can be converted directly to invoices — no re-entering data.

The pipeline feeds directly into the dashboard — your weighted pipeline value and its runway impact are always visible on the Pipeline Card and Runway Clock.

Expenses#

Log and categorize your business expenses. Mark expenses as recurring to track monthly obligations separately from one-off costs.

Available categories: Software, Equipment, Travel, Office, Marketing, Professional Services, Insurance, Meals, Subscriptions, and Other.

Receipt Scanner

Drop a photo of a receipt onto the "Add Expense" form (or click to upload) and Runway will pull out the amount, date, and vendor for you to review before saving. The scan runs entirely in your browser — the image is never uploaded to Runway or any third party, and isn't stored anywhere once you save the expense.

Billing an Expense to a Client

If you front a cost on a client's behalf — travel, materials, a subcontracted tool — check "Bill this expense to a client" at the top of the expense form and pick the client. Optionally add a flat handling fee, charged to the client as its own line item on top of the at-cost reimbursement.

Once an expense is marked billable, there are two ways to get it onto an invoice:

• Invoice Expenses — a button on the Expenses page that bundles all of a client's unbilled expenses into a new draft invoice
• Add to Invoice — click the "Unbilled" badge on any billable expense to add it to one of that client's existing draft, sent, or overdue invoices

Expenses awaiting reimbursement show up as a "Reimbursements owed" figure on the Runway Clock — see Runway Clock.

Scenarios#

Scenarios let you create and save named financial snapshots — hypothetical states you can compare against each other and against your live numbers.

Each scenario stores a cash amount, burn rate, and income sources. You can compare up to 3 scenarios side-by-side, or save your current state as a snapshot to come back to later.

Typical use cases:

• What if I took a month off with no income?
• What if I hired a contractor and expenses jumped $3,000/month?
• What does my runway look like if I land a $4,000/month retainer?
• Best case vs. worst case comparison before a risky decision

Reports#

The Reports page gives you a historical view of your business financials:

• Monthly Revenue — bar chart of the last 6 months
• Revenue by Client — top 10 clients by revenue
• Expense Breakdown — spending by category
• Client Health Overview — distribution of A–F health grades
• At-Risk Clients — clients with D or F health scores
• Tax Summary Export — year-end summary of income by client, expenses by category, and net profit

Reports are read-only and generated from your invoice and expense data. The more invoices you create in Runway, the more accurate and useful the reports become over time.

Tax Summary Export

At the bottom of the Reports page, select a year and export a full tax summary — income broken down by client, expenses broken down by category, and net profit. Designed to hand directly to an accountant.

• CSV export — spreadsheet-ready format for accountants
• PDF / print — clean printable version for your own records
• Year selector — export any year with data, not just the current one

Expenses you billed to a client and have already been paid back for are excluded from the "Expenses by Category" total — that cost has already come back to you, so counting it again would overstate your deductible expenses. The excluded amount is still shown separately (and included in the CSV export) so your accountant can apply their own judgment.

Subcontractors#

If you bring in help on client work — a designer, a developer, an editor — Subcontractors lets you track them the same way you track your own income and expenses, so the cost is visible in your runway numbers instead of living in a separate spreadsheet.

• Subcontractor profiles — name, specialty, contact info, and a default rate (hourly or fixed)
• Engagements — individual jobs tied to a subcontractor, optionally linked to one of your clients, with an amount, due date, and a recurring option for ongoing help
• Payment status — mark each engagement Unpaid, Partial, or Paid, and see what's overdue at a glance
• Runway impact — outstanding balances reduce your effective cash, and recurring engagements add to your burn rate, both reflected on the dashboard

Contracts#

Freelance work goes wrong in the gap between “we agreed on a call” and anything written down. Runway drafts the agreement, sends it, and collects a legally meaningful signature in the browser — without a separate e-signature subscription.

• Three shapes — project, retainer and hourly contracts, each compiled from clauses appropriate to that arrangement. Override any clause by hand and the compiler leaves your wording alone on re-compile
• Milestones — deposit, milestone and final payments are defined in the contract itself, then tracked from pending to invoiced to paid, so the payment schedule you agreed is the one you bill against
• Signed in the browser — the client opens a link, reads the document and signs — typed or drawn. No login, no account, no e-signature vendor
• Evidence, not a checkbox — a signature records the signer's name, the timestamp, the IP address captured server-side, the consent wording exactly as it stood at the time, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the document. Revising the consent copy later cannot change what a past signer saw
• You countersign — a contract is not complete until you sign it too, so both sides are on the record
• A real lifecycle — draft, sent, viewed, signed, completed, declined, expired and voided are distinct states — you can tell “they haven't opened it” from “they opened it and went quiet”
• Drafted with AI — describe the engagement and Runway proposes the clauses. You edit before anything is sent — it drafts, it does not decide

Projects & Job Margin#

Invoices tell you what a client paid. They cannot tell you whether the job was worth doing. A project groups one job's tracked hours, subcontractor costs and expenses against what the client agreed to pay, so you can see its margin while there is still time to do something about it.

• Agreed value vs. cost — the fee you quoted, minus your hours at your cost rate, your subcontractors, and your non-reimbursable expenses
• Budget burn — hours used against hours budgeted, so an overrun shows up at 80% rather than at delivery
• Effective hourly rate — the agreed value divided by the hours actually worked. Usually the most uncomfortable number on the page, and the most useful one when you quote the next job
• Unbilled work — every billable hour and reimbursable expense that was logged and never linked to an invoice, aged so you can see what is about to become uncollectable
• Import existing work — if you have been tracking time against a client for months, one click files it all against the project so the numbers reflect everything, not just what you logged since

Change Orders#

Scope grows in small, undocumented increments, and most of it gets absorbed because producing a signable amendment costs more effort than the increment is worth. A change order in Runway is a two-minute job that reuses the same signing flow as contracts.

• Priced for you — raise one from an over-budget project and the fee is pre-filled from the hours already past budget, at that project's rate
• A real document — the client opens a link, reads the exact added scope, the fee, and the revised project total, and approves it in their browser. No login, no account
• Evidence, not a note — approval records the name, timestamp, IP address, the consent wording as it stood, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of exactly what was agreed. The record cannot be edited or deleted afterwards
• It moves the budget — an approved change order adds to the project's agreed value and hour budget. The original figures are never overwritten, so you can always see how far the job drifted from what was signed
• Then bill it — approving a change order fixes the margin, not the bank balance. An approved one that has never been invoiced is flagged on the project, and one click raises the draft invoice for it
• It can reduce scope too — enter a negative amount for a deductive change order. Cutting a feature and crediting it back is a scope change like any other, and it gets the same written approval
• The contract stays in sync — the contract's own page lists every change order raised against it, with an amended total, so the agreement never quietly states a figure that stopped being true

Tax Summary#

Every January the same evening disappears into a spreadsheet, reconstructing a year of income and receipts into the shape a tax form wants. Runway already holds the year. The Taxes page arranges it the way Schedule C asks for it, so the work is reading it rather than rebuilding it.

• Arranged by line number — deductions are grouped onto the actual Schedule C (Form 1040) Part II lines, and each line shows which of your expense categories fed it, so your accountant can move anything they would classify differently
• Cash or accrual — cash basis, which is what most freelancers file, counts income in the year the money arrived rather than the year you invoiced. Both are one click apart
• The traps are handled — business meals are halved, because only 50% is deductible. Equipment is flagged rather than totalled, because it is depreciated rather than deducted outright
• 1099s you should receive — every client who paid you $600 or more has to send you a 1099-NEC by 31 January. Check the forms that arrive against the list; a form that disagrees with your records needs sorting out before you file
• 1099s you have to issue — if you paid a subcontractor $600 or more, you are the one required to file, by the same 31 January deadline. Runway flags who, and how much, in January while there is still time
• Print it — the whole summary prints to a clean page for whoever prepares your return

Monthly Digest#

A month closes and nobody reviews it, because reviewing it means opening six screens. The digest assembles the month that just ended into one page and offers it to you on the first of the next.

• Five sections — financial summary, pipeline movement, overdue invoices, at-risk clients and tax set-aside — the things worth knowing about a closed month
• Offered, not buried — an alert appears once the month is actually complete, and stays findable for a day after you first open it
• Shareable, selectively — share a digest by link with an accountant or a business partner, choosing which sections travel. What you leave out is never sent, not merely hidden

Team & Workspaces#

Runway starts as one person's workspace and grows into a small studio's without moving accounts. Invite people into yours, or be invited into someone else's, and switch between them from the sidebar.

• Four roles — owner, admin, member and viewer. A viewer can read the numbers without being able to change them, which is usually what a bookkeeper or a business partner actually needs
• Invite by email — the invitee accepts through a link and lands in the workspace. They keep their own login
• Belong to several — you can be an owner of your own workspace and a member of a studio's at the same time, and switch without logging out
• Enforced at the database — permissions are row-level security policies in Postgres, not checks in the interface. A role that cannot read something cannot read it however the request is made

Activity Log#

Once more than one person can change the books, “who marked this paid?” becomes a real question. The workspace activity log answers it.

• Decisions, not noise — it records deliberate acts — an invoice sent, a contract signed, a change order accepted, a teammate invited. Machine-derived states like an invoice ageing into overdue are deliberately left out, because a feed full of those hides the entries you actually came for
• Client actions too — a change order accepted or declined through the public portal is written server-side, with no logged-in user, so the record covers the moments that matter most in a dispute
• Append-only — the log grants insert and select and deliberately no update or delete. Nobody can quietly revise history, including the workspace owner

Profile & Business#

Set your name and business information. Business details (name, address, phone) appear on every invoice you create — set these up before sending your first invoice to clients.

Currency

Choose your display currency from 40+ supported currencies. This affects all money displayed throughout the app. All your data is stored as raw numbers — changing the currency updates the display only.

Tax Configuration

Set your estimated effective tax rate and whether you pay quarterly or annually. This powers the Tax Set Aside widget on the dashboard.

Alert Thresholds

Configure when the Alerts Banner appears on the dashboard. Set a warning threshold (e.g., 6 months) and a critical threshold (e.g., 3 months). You can also disable alerts entirely if you prefer a quieter dashboard.

AI Provider & Key

Fred, the AI assistant built into Runway, runs on your own API key instead of a shared one. Head to Settings → Fred AI, pick a provider — Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), or Google (Gemini) — and paste in your API key. Once it's saved, Fred is fully unlocked for chat and AI invoice drafting.

Data & Export

Export all your Runway data as a JSON file at any time. This includes your financial settings, invoices, clients, expenses, pipeline, and scenarios.

You can also permanently delete your account from this section. Deletion requires typing “DELETE” to confirm and removes all your data from our servers immediately and permanently.