Firsthold is a booking calendar, invoice generator, and income tracker built for freelance creatives, including VFX artists, illustrators, photographers, editors, motion designers, copywriters, and anyone else who juggles a variety of clients and jobs, as well as client invoices instead of a single steady paycheck. Here's a real walkthrough of what you can actually do with it, section by section.
Who Is Firsthold Actually For?
Firsthold started in the VFX and animation world, where "first hold" and "second hold" (or “first pencil” and “second pencil” in the UK) are the language everyone already speaks to organize booking priorities between multiple clients. But the underlying problem, juggling multiple potential bookings, tracking day rates across clients, and getting paid on unpredictable timelines, isn't unique to the animation industry. It's just as real for a freelance photographer holding a wedding date against a corporate shoot, an illustrator weighing two book deals with overlapping deadlines, a video editor stacking client projects back to back, or a copywriter tracking retainers alongside one-off gigs.
If your income comes from booked blocks of time rather than a salary, the tools in this app map onto your business.
How Do You Track Where Your Year Is Going?
The Overview screen is the first thing you see, and it's built to answer one question fast: how is this year actually going? You can flip between three views, All Time, Year-to-Date, and Month-to-Date, so you're never stuck doing mental math to figure out if a slow month is actually a problem or just... a slow month. Set an annual income target once, and Overview tracks your progress against it automatically.
It also surfaces your average day rate, both across every booking you've ever logged and specifically for this year versus last. That comparison alone answers a question a lot of freelancers can only guess at: are my rates actually going up, or does it just feel that way? Switch between years any time to compare performance year over year, and jump straight to your bookings list with one click when you want the raw detail behind the numbers.
How Do You Log and Manage Bookings?
Every booking gets a client name, a role, start and end dates, day count, rate, and rate type, daily or hourly, plus space for notes. Earnings calculate automatically from rate times days, but if a job doesn't fit that formula (a flat fee, a bonus, whatever), you can override it with a manual figure instead.
Hourly bookings get their own flexibility: set a default number of hours per day if your schedule is consistent, or log hours day by day when a job's hours actually vary. Every booking carries a status, Active, Pending, Paid, or Unpaid, that you cycle through as the job moves along, and you can edit or delete any booking inline without digging through a settings menu. Pull up all bookings for any year, sorted by start date, whenever you want the full picture.
How Do You Track Holds Without Losing Track of Them?
This is where the calendar earns its keep. It's a monthly view that color-codes every date: booked, on hold, or second hold, so you can see your actual availability at a glance instead of cross-referencing three different email threads. Click any date to see exactly what's sitting on it.
Adding availability is a two-click process: click a start date, click an end date, and a modal opens where you set the type, Booked, Hold, or Second Hold. If a hold and a booking happen to overlap (it happens), the calendar shows a split-color cell instead of hiding the conflict from you. Every range is editable or deletable straight from the day-detail panel, and a Monthly Agenda view lists out every range and booking for the month in plain text if a grid isn't what you need in that moment. For anyone who already lives in Google Calendar, Firsthold connects to it directly instead of asking you to maintain two calendars in parallel.
If you're newer to the hold system itself, here's what a first hold actually means and how it's different from a second hold.
How Do You Track Expenses and Daily To-Dos?
Right alongside your bookings, a sidebar handles the smaller stuff that's easy to lose track of: to-do tasks and business expenses. Add a task with a text label, check it off when it's done, delete it when it's not relevant anymore. Nothing complicated, just enough to keep a running list without opening a separate app.
Expenses work similarly: log a description, an amount, and a frequency, monthly, annual, or one-off, and Firsthold annualizes the cost automatically so you can see your real yearly overhead at a glance instead of adding up a dozen line items by hand. Delete anything that no longer applies.
How Do You See the Bigger Picture for the Year?
The Stats section is where the daily data turns into something you can actually act on. A Yearly Goal Progress chart visualizes booked days against your annual target, so you know whether you're actually on pace or just hoping you are. A Historical Monthly Trends chart tracks booking lead time month by month, with hover tooltips showing the exact days, the average, and how far off a given month was from that average, useful for spotting whether your slow season really is predictable or if this year is genuinely different.
A YTD earnings card shows progress toward your goal in real time, and a live Tax Estimate card gives you a running sense of what you'll owe based on what you've actually earned so far, not a guess you make once in January and forget about. Every chart switches cleanly between years for comparison.
How Do You Handle Invoicing and Getting Paid on Time?
Invoices generate directly from an existing booking, auto-filling the client, dates, rate, and total so you're not retyping information you already entered once. From there you can customize the invoice number, due date, tax rate, notes, and payment terms before generating a downloadable PDF. Every invoice you've sent lives in one list, so you're never digging through email to find out what you actually billed a client three months ago.
The Pay Date Estimator solves a specific, recurring headache: enter your invoice date, and it calculates the NET30 due date automatically, adjusting for weekends and public holidays so you're not left guessing whether a Saturday due date actually means the following Monday. The holiday calendar itself is configurable per region, so the adjustment is accurate whether you're invoicing from the US, UK, or elsewhere.
How Do You Prepare for Tax Season?
Pick any year and export a full Tax Summary PDF: your name, the year, your currency, and every booking with client, dates, days or hours, rate, and earnings, all totaled. If you've logged expenses, a second page itemizes them by frequency and annual cost, then shows your net earnings after deductions. It's built to be the single document you hand to an accountant instead of a folder of scattered invoices and a spreadsheet you're not totally sure is up to date.
How Do You Set Up Firsthold for Your Business?
Settings covers the details that make everything above feel like it's actually built around your business specifically. Set your default day and hourly rate so new bookings pre-fill automatically, pick a default currency (USD, GBP, EUR, or a custom one), and set your preferred date format. Your holiday calendar region feeds directly into the Pay Date Estimator's accuracy, so it's worth setting correctly even if you never touch it again after that.
Invoicing presets save your business name, address, registration number, and banking details once, so every invoice pulls from the same source instead of you retyping your routing number for the tenth time. If you're switching from spreadsheets, import your existing booking history from a CSV instead of starting from zero. From the same screen you can manage your subscription plan, change your password, or delete your account entirely.
Dark mode and light mode are both available, and your chosen currency updates consistently across every screen in the app, not just the one you set it on.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Firsthold only for VFX and animation freelancers?
No. Firsthold's language, hold, second hold, day rate, grew out of the VFX and animation world, but the mechanics apply to any freelancer who books blocks of time with clients: photographers, illustrators, editors, motion designers, copywriters, and more.
Do I need to use every feature, or can I just track bookings?
You can use as much or as little as you want. Plenty of freelancers start with just the booking calendar and income tracking, then pick up invoicing, tax exports, or the Pay Date Estimator later once those become relevant.
Does Firsthold replace my accountant?
No, but it makes their job easier. The Tax Summary export is built to hand off directly, a clean record of your bookings, earnings, and expenses for the year, rather than something they have to reconstruct from scratch.
Can I track multiple currencies if I work with international clients?
Firsthold supports USD, GBP, EUR, or a custom currency as your default display currency, and that setting updates consistently across bookings, invoices, and stats.
What's the difference between the Junior and Lead plans?
Junior covers the core: bookings, calendar, expense and to-do logging, importing your history, and an annual tax report. Lead adds deeper analytics, estimated taxes and payment dates, earning projections, and full invoice management. Compare the full feature breakdown before choosing.