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Evaluate Your Professional Worth

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Don't settle for less because you're in the dark — figure out exactly what you're worth and get paid what you deserve. Photo by Maurits Burgers/Source/CC

spacer spacer As techy jobs push further and further into the wilderness of innovation, new tools and new rules have become increasingly required for assessing and tracking one’s deserved compensation. Workers of the world rejoice! Instead of sauntering empty-handed into that meeting to ask your boss for a raise, you can use one of a slew of new sites and apps that have come to help calculate what you deserve whether you're applying for a salaried position or clocking freelance hours. Here’s a run-through.

This article was written by John Flanagan, a Vermont-based writer, film fan, and intermittent bon vivant.

Contents

  • 1 Websites that Help Assess Your Professional Worth Based on Experience
    • 1.1 PayScale.com
    • 1.2 Salary.com
    • 1.3 SalaryExpert
    • 1.4 WageExchange
  • 2 Websites that Help Track Your Work Hours
    • 2.1 Toggl
    • 2.2 Harvest
    • 2.3 Tick
    • 2.4 Cashboard
    • 2.5 FreshBooks
    • 2.6 yaTimer

Websites that Help Assess Your Professional Worth Based on Experience

PayScale.com

PayScale uses a real-time, user-reported profiling system based upon your job title, location, education, and experience. It also predicts your future career moves, tells you which cities you’d be economically most fruitful in, browses local job listings, and provides information on current or potential bosses.

The most basic version of PayScale, My PayScale, is free and includes comparative salary/hourly cash compensation data, sneak peeks into three profiles of other workers, and access to job listings. PayScale Premium, at $19.95, earns you PDFs of your PayScale report, a negotiation guide, and just a few more bells and whistles than the basic service. PayScale MarketRate considers current market data, employee attributes and company location and size to determine appropriate wages for employers to set. Individual reports are available for $219 ($799 for a six pack).


Salary.com

A predecessor of PayScale, Salary.com similarly offers employee-driven wage information and hosts a healthy wealth of career resources. While assessing your professional value, take advantage of its job-search and college-planning tools; test your workplace personality traits or brush up on the dos and don’ts of office etiquette. Also, you can find out what your superiors rake in with Salary.com’s Executive Salary Report.

Salary.com’s free Salary Wizard, which appears on Monster.com, CNNMoney, and many other sites, culls a list of jobs similar to yours in your region for wage comparison. You can also purchase Salary’s Personal Salary Report, which offers “experts’ opinions” on your market value. Prices for the Salary Report PDF vary depending on the cost and difficulty of analyzing your customized data.

SalaryExpert

SalaryExpert offers a platform with most of the same features as the databases listed above. Its free Broad-Range SalaryReport, however, is far less detailed than the aforementioned free reports, and its Personal Salary Report lets you customize your information for $29 (i.e., $29 more than what PayScale and Salary.com charge for the same service). SalaryExpert also has a business/HR resource, which runs for $889.

WageExchange

WageExchange aims specifically at accounting, IT, and advertising professionals. It’s not free, and the nuisance of their account-creating system is reason enough to browse elsewhere for salary comparison.

Websites that Help Track Your Work Hours

Toggl

Toggl has an efficient time-tracking program available for use on its website, on your desktop, or as an app on your iPhone or Android. The program integrates other accounting software, such as QuickBooks or FreshBooks, and provides charts to show how your time has been spent. With Toggl, you can send PDFs of your progress to colleagues and clients and add up to 200 team members to any given project. You can also pre-define specific tasks for team members. Bonus: It’s free.

Harvest

Harvest offers a one-click time entry database available online, as a desktop widget, or as a mobile device app. The program automatically integrates invoices and reminds employees to submit their timesheets. For the “Solo” freelancer, Harvest costs a mere $12 per month; $40 for “Basic,” and $90 for “Business.”

Tick

Tick is purposely less flashy than Toggl. “You won't find complex charts of theoretical data here,” their website boasts. You can choose the monthly rate of $9, $19, $39, or $79, depending on your interests and the size of your business. Tick is also available as an iPhone app.

Cashboard

Cashboard focuses mostly on creating, configuring, and automatically sending invoices. Also available as a desktop widget, Cashboard tracks your time daily, weekly, or whenever you remember all those hours you’ve worked but forgot to record. A free account is available for one active employee with one client invoiced and two active projects per month. All others can check out Cashboard’s “Dynamic” paying plan, which starts at $10 per month.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks wins its appeal from its ability to integrate with other invoice software, though it offers its own tools for sending and following-up on invoices, bookkeeping, and time tracking as well. Like Cashboard, you can continue to use FreshBooks on-site or as an app for free. Paid packages start at $19.95 per month.

yaTimer

Available as a downloadable app only, yaTimer is the most bare-bones self-timer of the list. It features a countdown, the ability to run multiple timers at once, editable and printable time sheets, analytical reports, and colors that make it resemble Snood. No go on yaTime for Mac users, though; this gadget is for the PC alone.


This page was last modified 20:00, 10 April 2012 by howto_admin. Based on work by amyzimmerman.

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