A HULL man inspired by his singer wife’s struggles with track­ing invoices and mileage has cre­ated an app for freel­an­cers they say effect­ively solves “admin chaos” and makes tax returns simple.

Lil­lie Topham per­forms under the stage name of Lil­lie Ker­man and travels thou­sands of miles across York­shire to per­form more than 50 gigs a year at wed­dings, cor­por­ate events, and private parties. Lil­lie said she found the admin involved in being a freel­ance per­former “such a head­ache”.

The singer works with mul­tiple agen­cies, each with dif­fer­ent com­mis­sion struc­tures and pay­ment terms. She also has to track her mileage, invoices, incom­ing pay­ments, com­mis­sion and gig track­ing - all while per­form­ing, pro­mot­ing, and rehears­ing.

Unfor­tu­nately, this meant admin fell through the cracks. Invoices went out late, mileage got guessed, and tax time meant a week­end of dread and a shoe­box of receipts.

In addi­tion, the intro­duc­tion of Mak­ing Tax Digital (MTD) on April 6 adds to the admin work­load for an already busy sched­ule, with thou­sands of self-employed per­formers and freel­an­cers facing quarterly report­ing require­ments for the first time.

Sam Topham, who owns Super­lin­ear Web Design, looked for an app that could handle gig track­ing, invoicing, mileage, com­mis­sion and UK tax report­ing in one place. He quickly dis­covered noth­ing exis­ted: gig cal­en­dar apps did not under­stand money, and account­ing apps did not under­stand gig­ging.

So, using Lov­able.dev and Aiassisted devel­op­ment, Sam built Gig­flow in under a week, a product that would have taken a tra­di­tional devel­op­ment team months, cre­at­ing the first work­ing ver­sion of with Lil­lie as the first user and co-cre­ator.

It’s an app that takes away the hassle and stress of keep­ing track of admin work, but it does it in the back­ground invis­ibly so that freel­an­cers can focus on what it is they do best, their craft and the growth of their busi­ness.

The app allows per­formers to run their busi­nesses without any know­ledge of account­ancy or the admin side of things that some freel­an­cers aren’t con­fid­ent with. It means tax reports can be ready in 10 minutes, not 10 hours, and with mileage cal­cu­lated auto­mat­ic­ally at HMRC rates, so the per­former can claim what they are owed.

Gig­flow allows freel­ance per­formers to track their gigs, cre­ate invoices, cal­cu­late mileage and deal with tax effort­lessly because it was built by someone who watched a singer struggle with exactly this chaos.

Lil­lie said: “Before Gig­flow, I had two phys­ical diar­ies, an iphone cal­en­dar, a What­s­app group where I’d update my band with dates, an online cal­en­dar and a spread­sheet on the com­puter - it was a mess.

“I had dif­fer­ent tabs for mileage, manu­ally work­ing out where each gig was, try­ing to cal­cu­late it all. It was such a head­ache every year and so stress­ful. I’m cre­at­ive. I want to do the gig and not have to think about tax.”

“Gig­flow is tailored spe­cific­ally for musi­cians like myself who want to take the head­ache out of the admin and focus on the cre­at­ive side. I check the app every day to see what’s com­ing up at the week­end. It keeps everything in line. It’s like hav­ing a second brain work­ing for you.”

For more inform­a­tion about the app, visit gig­flow.co.uk