TaskView for Freelancers

How freelancers can use TaskView for project management, client work tracking, budget and income tracking, and task organization. Free self-hosted alternative to paid tools.

TaskView works well for freelancers who juggle multiple clients and need a simple way to track tasks, deadlines, and money - without paying for a SaaS subscription.

TaskView is source-available software. Before using it, please review the license to make sure your use case is covered. Freelancers may use TaskView for their own task management (Internal Use), but providing access to clients or third parties is not permitted under the community license.

Why TaskView for freelancing

No per-seat costs - it's free and self-hosted
Financial tracking built in - attach income/expense amounts to tasks
One project per client - keep work separated with independent permissions
Full data ownership - your client data stays on your server
Deadline tracking - the dashboard shows what's due today and what's coming up

Setting up for client work

One project per client

Create a separate project for each client. This gives you:

Independent task lists (e.g., "Website", "Marketing", "Maintenance")
Client-specific tags ("urgent", "waiting-for-feedback", "billable")
Separate Kanban workflows per project
Clean separation when archiving completed client work

Track income per task

Use the financial amount field on tasks to log what each piece of work is worth:

Open a task
Set the financial amount
Mark it as income

This gives you a per-project view of expected and completed revenue. While TaskView isn't accounting software, it's enough to see at a glance how much a project is worth.

Use deadlines consistently

Set deadlines on every task that has a due date. The dashboard widgets - "Today's tasks" and "Upcoming deadlines" - become your daily planner across all clients.

Kanban for workflow stages

Set up Kanban columns that match your freelance workflow:

Backlog - ideas and future work
To Do - committed work for this week/sprint
In Progress - actively working on
Waiting for Feedback - sent to client, waiting for response
Done - completed and delivered

Tags for cross-project filtering

Create consistent tags across projects:

billable / non-billable
urgent
recurring
blocked

Backing up your work

Since TaskView is self-hosted, you're responsible for backups. Set up a regular PostgreSQL backup (daily pg_dump to a separate location) so you never lose client data.

Deploy TaskView on a VPS with Nginx

Step-by-step guide to deploy TaskView on a VPS with Nginx reverse proxy, SSL certificates via Let's Encrypt, and Docker Compose. Production-ready self-hosted setup.