Freelancer

Freelance pricing goes wrong in a predictable place: the target salary gets divided by 2,000 hours and the result is called an hourly rate. Both halves of that are wrong. It ignores the cost of running the business, and it assumes every working hour is a paid hour.
Billable hours are not working hours. Admin, proposals, invoicing, bookkeeping and the hour lost whenever a call moves are all real and none of them are billed. A third to a half of the week going non-billable is normal for a solo operator, not a sign of poor discipline. Someone billing four days a week at six productive hours, taking six weeks off, has roughly 1,104 billable hours in a year. That is about 55% of the 2,000 the naive sum assumes, and dividing by the wrong number understates the rate by nearly half.
Then tax takes its share. Self-employment income is hit twice: 15.3% self-employment tax on 92.35% of net earnings, then income tax on what remains. Nothing is withheld, so the money sits in the account looking like profit until a quarterly payment falls due. A rate that looks healthy gross can land well short of the target once both layers are applied.
Day rates carry their own trap. A day rate sells the whole day. If the client believes the fee buys eight hours and you priced it on six, your real hourly is a quarter lower than you think and the admin time the whole model depends on has nowhere to live. Say what a booked day includes when you quote it — the day rate to hourly calculator shows what each hour really costs.
These calculators run in your browser and nothing is uploaded. The rate and capacity workflow chains them in order if you would rather work through the whole thing than use one at a time.
Working out what you actually earned
The rate you quote and the rate you realise are different numbers, and the gap is where the year disappears. Divide what you collected by every hour you worked, including the unbilled ones, and you get the realised hourly. It is always lower than the quoted rate. If it is dramatically lower, the cause is usually scope creep on fixed-price work or a client whose revisions are not written into the agreement.
Track it per client rather than in aggregate. An average across the year hides the one engagement that paid well and the one that quietly consumed three weekends, and those two need opposite responses.
Quarterly tax is a cash flow problem, not a tax problem
Nothing is withheld from a 1099 payment, so the tax portion sits in your account looking exactly like money. The standard advice is to move 25% to 30% of every payment into a separate account on the day it clears, before you look at the balance. Missing an estimated payment can add an underpayment penalty on top of the bill, which turns a planning failure into a cash one.
Deductions reduce the profit that both taxes are calculated on, so a genuine business expense is worth more than its face value. That is a reason to record them properly, not a reason to invent them.