Freelance Income Tracker

Why the tax-year boundary matters more than it looks

Pakistan’s tax year runs 1 July to 30 June, and it is named for the year it ends in: the year beginning July 2026 is tax year 2027, written 2026-27. That sounds like trivia until you are reconciling a year’s income and discover that June and July payments have been filed together. A payment received on 30 June belongs to one tax year and one received on 1 July belongs to the next, and a spreadsheet organised by calendar month will quietly put them in the same bucket.

This tracker buckets on the July-to-June boundary, and the behaviour at those exact dates is covered by tests rather than assumed — because an off-by-one here misfiles every payment in the two busiest months of the boundary.

Record the rate you got, not the rate that was quoted

Every payment stores its own exchange rate, which is the single most useful thing this tool does. Freelancers commonly track earnings in dollars and convert the annual total once, at whatever rate applies when they do the sum. That produces a rupee figure that corresponds to nothing: not what the bank credited, not what appears on any statement, and not what a tax computation should start from.

Storing the rate per payment means a $1,000 payment received at 280 and another at 292 are recorded as Rs 280,000 and Rs 292,000 — which is what actually happened. The totals then reconcile against your bank records instead of approximating them.

A worked example

Four payments: $100 on 30 June 2026 at 280, $200 on 1 July 2026 at 285, Rs 50,000 on 15 July, and $300 on 2 August 2026 at 290. Those are Rs 28,000, Rs 57,000, Rs 50,000 and Rs 87,000. Tax year 2026 gets the first payment only, at Rs 28,000. Tax year 2027 gets the other three, at Rs 194,000. July as a calendar month shows Rs 107,000 — the two July payments — which is a different grouping from either tax year, and both views are useful for different purposes.

Local storage is private and fragile in equal measure

Nothing here is uploaded. Your client names, amounts and rates stay in this browser, which is genuinely private in a way a cloud tracker is not. The trade-off is real though: the record does not follow you to another device, it does not survive clearing site data, and in private browsing it may not survive closing the tab. There is no server-side copy to restore from, because there is no server.

So export a CSV periodically and keep it somewhere you back up. The export is a plain, properly quoted CSV that opens in Excel or Google Sheets, and it imports back without losing rows — including client names with commas in them, which is where naive CSV handling usually corrupts data without saying so.

For the tax side, see the freelancer tax calculator. To bill a client in the first place, the invoice generator produces a PDF locally.