How to Get Started with Payday Relay

You may have plenty of work without a clear answer to a simple question: How much is enough for this week?

That can happen when you freelance, take contract assignments, work through a gig platform, or run a one-person service business. The work and the payments may arrive on different schedules. No employer sets your payday, accounts for your time off, or tells you when you’ve reached your weekly goal.

Payday Relay gives independent earners a weekly income target and a way to follow their progress toward it. It’s a finish line for your earnings, not a schedule that tells you what hours to work.

Who is Payday Relay for?

Payday Relay is for people who earn independently and need to create their own structure around money and work. That includes freelancers, 1099 contractors, platform workers, and solo service providers.

You don’t need to be paid by the hour. If you’re paid per project, assignment, client, or platform payout, the same question can still apply: What do I need to earn this week, and how will I know when I’ve done enough?

Start with your weekly target

The Relay Calculator helps you turn a bigger financial picture into one weekly number. You can account for what you need to live on, along with plans for taxes, time off, savings, and debt.

Your target is a planning number, not a prediction of what every week will bring in. You can revisit it as your costs or goals change. It also isn’t tax advice; use your own records and a qualified tax professional when deciding what you need to set aside.

Run your free 4-Relay Sprint

A relay is one earning week. The free 4-Relay Sprint gives you four weeks to try the method with your own target and see how it fits your work.

The goal isn’t to make every week identical. Independent income rarely works that way. The target gives you a consistent reference point, so a strong week, a slow week, and a week you take off don’t all blur together.

Connect your Google Sheet

During setup, you can connect Google so Payday Relay can create your personal relay sheet in your Google Drive. The app and sheet work together: you can log income in the app and see it reflected in the sheet without entering the same number twice.

Your sheet gives you a longer view of your relays and your plans for taxes and other set-asides. It does not move money between bank accounts or make those transfers for you.

Log what you’ve earned and what you’ve received

As you work through a relay, log your income and check your progress against your weekly target. Payday Relay helps you see what’s left to reach that number, rather than relying on a bank balance that doesn’t explain which week’s work the money belongs to.

Sometimes you’ve earned money but haven’t been paid yet. Use Pending Payments to record that income without treating it as cash in hand. When the payment arrives, update the same entry to record what you received; you don’t need to log the income a second time.

That distinction matters. A late payment shouldn’t make it look as though you didn’t do the work, but money that hasn’t arrived shouldn’t fund your tax, time-off, savings, debt, or bonus plans yet.

Reaching your target gives you a financial finish line for the week. It doesn’t cancel commitments you’ve made to clients or dictate your working hours. It gives you better information for deciding where to focus your energy and when you can step away.

What happens after four relays?

At the end of your Sprint, you’ll have four weeks of your own results to look at. You can see whether your target was useful, where payment timing affected your progress, and what you may want to adjust. From there, you can decide whether to continue with Payday Relay.

Ready to try it with your own numbers? Start your free 4-Relay Sprint.