What's really going on

You're a solo transcriber handling medical bills and plans. Work comes in by phone and email, 50-200 a month. Your risk isn't pipeline management — it's a job slipping between a voicemail and an inbox, or a file getting mixed up between two patients. That's an intake and confidentiality problem, not a sales problem.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheets (free) — one row per job: date, caller/sender, patient initials only, file link, status (new / in progress / delivered / paid). One tab, no colors, no formulas you'll forget.
2. Zapier (free tier) — one Zap: new email to your work address creates a row in that sheet with subject, sender, and timestamp. Now email jobs log themselves.
3. Habit — end every call by adding the row before you hang up. If it isn't in the sheet, it doesn't exist.

Do this in the next 30 minutes: open a new Google Sheet, name the seven columns above, and paste in every open job from the last two weeks. That is your system.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you HubSpot Free or Freshsales because they're "free" and "for small business." They're built for sales teams chasing deals, not a solo transcriber tracking jobs — you'll spend a weekend setting up pipelines you don't need and abandon it in a month. Doing nothing costs you the occasional dropped job and a slow slide into missed deadlines — small per incident, but in medical work one lost file is a bigger problem than a lost sale.

When to revisit this

When you hire a second transcriber or a coordinator, or when a clinic asks for a shared status view.

The part worth getting right

The one call is where the patient data lives. If you're transcribing bills and plans, that sheet is going to hold PHI-adjacent info — names, dates, providers — and Google Workspace consumer accounts aren't set up for HIPAA. If your clients are US healthcare providers who expect a BAA, you need a Google Workspace Business plan with a signed BAA before you put a single patient name in that sheet — otherwise you're one audit away from losing the client. If your work is scrubbed or you're a subcontractor whose clients handle PHI upstream, plain Sheets is fine. Same seven columns, very different setup underneath, and picking wrong costs you a client, not a weekend.