As a freelancer, how much does YJ cost to use?
YJ is free to use as a freelancer.
When you are booked for a contract and following a weekly timesheet being signed off by the employer, we invoice the employer your rate plus our booking fee. Unlike other platforms out there, we'll never take a cut of your earnings, every penny is yours.
I'm part of a creative team, do we need to register individually?
Yes, please.
You can add to your bio and title that you are one half of a team, but your profile needs to be in your name, with your individual day rate.
Support for hiring teams (e.g. art director + copywriter) is on the roadmap. If this is of interest please get in touch - the more people ask for it, the higher up it gets on the backlog.
How long will it take for my profile to be approved?
We review every profile individually and it can take us up to 7 days. The more information you provide at this stage, the easier it is for us to verify your experience.
There are a few things you can do to help us speed up the approval process:
Add a bio of around 200-400 characters to highlight and explain your expertise.
Add any additional links showcasing your work. Please make sure your portfolio does not require logging into another service, and if it’s password-protected that you mention the password in your bio.
Provide at least one reference email
Add a short description of each work experience you provide.
You can always add more references and build a more thorough work history to form a truly exceptional YunoJuno profile.
If you have been asked to sign up to YunoJuno to accept a brief from a particular client, it’s not necessary for you to have your profile approved - the client will link with you on the platform. Just share your email address with them so they can add you to their directory and send you a direct booking.
If you’re encountering any issues in this process, please contact hello@yunojuno.com.
First contract - what happens next?
Yet to take a contract through YunoJuno and want to know the next steps? Here’s a quick run down of the process:
If you have applied directly to a brief, the client will receive a notification and will review your profile. Don’t forget to include a cover note as a summary as to why you should be considered for the brief. You can also ask any additional questions about the work involved.
If you are responding to a client’s direct shortlist request, please reply with your interest, availability, and a cover note to state why you're perfect for the work. The client will receive a notification once you’ve responded.
The client will then review all of the profiles they’ve selected, and will often at that point reach out for a phone call or meeting. This can be either via the YunoJuno messaging function, or directly if you’ve shared your contact details via the platform.
If selected from that process, the client should always raise a contract through YunoJuno. Do not start work until you have agreed to and signed a YunoJuno contract, otherwise you will not be protected by our terms of engagement.
Review and sign the contract, promptly raising any queries with the client or YunoJuno’s help team.
Once your contract begins, you can submit your timesheets weekly.
Once you have submitted your timesheet, you can then upload your invoice directly to YunoJuno for payment. Do not invoice the client directly, as this will cause delays to payment.
Click on timesheets and invoicing for more information.
As a freelancer, how can I provide my services?
Choosing how to operate as a freelancer in a legal and business sense is an important decision for all freelancers as it will designate how you may work, which laws apply, how you are taxed and which clients can work with you.
At YunoJuno, we ensure this decision is yours and allow you the freedom to operate with clients in a number of different ways and we also allow you to change this on a per-contract basis, to aid in being flexible when you need it.
When a client decides to offer you a contract on the platform, these details are baked into the contract and cannot be changed after you have accepted the contract. You must continue to operate under the same structure for the length of the contract, or communicate with your client to start a new one under any new business structure.
The options available are split into whether you are operating via a GB (United Kingdom) entity or internationally.
The options are:
GB: via a Personal Service Company (Limited Company)
If you’ve registered your company at Companies House, and you’re the sole shareholder and director, then it's very likely you fall into this category. You will be subject to IR35 (Off-payroll) regulations when accepting contracts, please see our section on IR35.
GB: via an Umbrella intermediary
An umbrella company is a company which you have registered to be an employee of, so that they run PAYE on the revenue you receive for providing your services.
We only allow freelancers using FCSA-accredited umbrella companies.
Freelancers taking this route will submit timesheets to YunoJuno which get passed to approval with your client; once approved, you may notify your Umbrella company to invoice us and we will pay them as your intermediary. They will then in turn deduct the relevant taxes and pay you.
GB: via a Sole Trader
A sole trader is someone providing business services as an individual in the United Kingdom. We expect freelancers operating via this structure to maintain a separate Sole Trader business account.
Freelancers taking this route will be paid directly by YunoJuno.
International
If you are a non-GB freelancer, you may operate on our platform with a business structure relevant to the country in which you reside. Please speak to our support team if you would like more information on this route.
How do I see more briefs?
Currently, you can see briefs by your role category, and by your day rate.
This is so that employers can see the most relevant freelancers for the role and rate that they are looking within.
To ensure that you're seeing the best briefs for you, make sure that your role and day rate are correctly selected.
How are the briefs I see selected?
The briefs that appear on your ‘Briefs’ page are based on the category you selected on sign-up (Creative, Project Management, UX, etc), your location, and your day rate.
The 'Available' tab contains all of the live briefs that you can apply to based on your discipline. You can also filter your list to find the briefs that match your preferences, by Roles, Full / Part-time, Work location and IR35 status(if you provide your services through a Personal Service Company).
We are constantly refining the 'matching' process, so this will change over time to incorporate more of your profile information (previous clients, skills, work experience).How do I track my applications?
Inside the 'Briefs' tab, the ‘Active’ tab is where you can manage any applications you have in progress. You can view the status of each of your briefs and also filter them.
If a brief is no longer available, it will be moved to the Archived tab and you will also receive an email letting you know that it has been closed by the client.
Archived briefs will be removed after 30 days.
How YunoJuno Freelancer bookings count work
As part of supercharging YJ freelancer profiles this year, we are adding the number of positively rated bookings a freelancer has had to all profiles and other areas of the platform. This is to showcase our fantastic freelancers and the great work they do.
When a freelancer completes a booking on the platform, the client gets the opportunity to say if it went well. Every booking we can verify as successful contributes to the freelancer’s count of positive bookings.
And that’s it. The score you see is simply the total count of positively rated bookings a freelancer has completed.
Your availability
We’ve recently updated the way you can set your Availability on the YunoJuno platform, giving you more flexibility to tell us if you want to show up in clients’ search results and the option to boost your profile to show higher in the results.
‘Open to opportunities’ means clients can see you in search results and will know you're available. This is usually your default status and it won’t change automatically when you have an active booking, allowing you to look for your next role or another project to work on.
Use ‘Boost me!’ to let clients know that you’re actively looking for a new role and are available immediately. This will bump you up in their search results when you match the skills searched. After a period of time, your status automatically reverts back to ‘Open to opportunities’.
Top tip: Make sure your profile and skills are up to date to ensure you appear in relevant searches.
Are you busy working on a brief and don’t want to be contacted? Select ‘Not looking right now’, to remove yourself from search results. Once you’re available again, you can return to your dashboard to update your status.
Your current status is also indicated on your profile icon. Click on this, to access a shortcut to your availability controls. The ⏸ , and ⚡️ represent the same statuses you can set on your dashboard.
11. Cancellation fee
As a freelancer, you can (if you wish) add a cancellation fee to your booking in case the client cancels the contract at short notice before the start date.
You should only use this for long assignments booked well in advance and be reasonable in how you calculate your cancellation fee.
If you have never applied a cancellation fee before and don't know what it should be, you can use a simple formula to get a ballpark figure based on your rate and the time taken to find a new assignment.
Cancellation fee = Daily rate x Estimated time taken to find a new assignment
For example if your day rate is £250, and it will take you approximately 3 days to time a new role, you could set your cancellation fee to £750.
It’s important to remember that a cancellation fee isn’t a right, you do have to get the client to agree to it. So it’s really important to be reasonable in what you ask for.
What’s reasonable would depend on the circumstances. So for example, the £750 cancellation fee from that example above would look very reasonable to a client on a booking for a 4 week assignment, but if it was a booking for just a couple of days, then that looks more unreasonable to a client.
As a rule of thumb, a cancellation fee should never be higher than day rate x number of days in the notice period for the assignment.
The cancellation fee will only apply if the assignment is cancelled – it’s quite possible that a client may ask you to move your dates a little, and that’s up to you and the client to agree. Moving an assignment is not a cancellation.