Recent articles on invoicing at FWJ (which I linked to yesterday) and The Golden Pencil have gotten me thinking about general freelance invoicing practices. And the thing is, there are no general practices. We all seem to have a vastly different way of doing things. Some I’ve seen over the last few days (paraphrased, with my comments) include:
- I invoice using PayPal. But what if the client doesn’t use PayPal?
- I use the client’s template for every client. Oh my GOD, that is insane.
- I use my own template for some clients and the client’s template for others. How do you keep it straight?
- My clients have never requested an invoice. I’m sorry, WHAT?
My feeling on invoicing is (a) that it needs to happen and (b) that it needs to be consistent. The actual method you use for invoicing doesn’t really matter as long as your invoices are professional and include all of the necessary info, but you need to be invoicing and keeping records of your income no matter what. There must be a paper trail (or pixel trail, if you do everything electronically like I do) of your income, if for no other reason than to have a record to turn to if someone fails to pay.
I started out with MS Word for invoicing, but that got old fast because I hated having to go to a million different files to update payments and never having everything in a central location. I switched to QuickBooks Simple Start, and then upgraded to QuickBooks Pro when my client base expanded. I love QB because it lets me get to everything in one place and the invoices are highly customizable.
One theme I’ve been hearing lately is that each client has a custom invoice template they want their vendors to use. Are they kidding? Do they think the business world revolves around them? I have neither the time nor inclination to do some company’s accounting department’s job. If I give you the information you need, there is no good reason for you to requiring that I submit it in your template. That’s just an unreasonable request. You’re mandating how my business conducts its accounting. You can’t do that. And besides, I have to create a QuickBooks invoice for you anyway to keep my recordkeeping straight, so you’re making me do twice the work and not paying me for it. That doesn’t work for me.
Read More...Freelancers Beware of Receiving Payments via Credit Card through PayPal
I’m a freelance web designer and I recently had an experience with a client using PayPal as a payment method which I think more freelancers need to be aware of.
Mistake #1: I didn’t research my client.
In February last year, a potential client emailed me and said he’d seen my site in a CSS design showcase and asked me to quote for a project he had. I spent a lot of time helping him through the jargon and helping him lay a good foundation for a successful web project by defining his ideas of what he wanted the site to achieve. After lots of the usual emails back and forth, he then abruptly emailed and said “This is on hold sorry”. He disappeared for a couple of months and then made contact again only after he said he’d “wasted 4 weeks with the last designer”. Now I know obviously this should have sent a few alarm bells ringing, and with hindsight being 20/20, I should have questioned and done a bit of research on this client before I made the decision to accept the job.
Mistake #2: I accepted credit card payments via PayPal.
As the client was in New York and I was in Brisbane, Australia, I thought I’d better be cautious let him know up front that I’ll require payment at regular intervals. First, a small deposit up-front, then only at key stages when work has been completed and approved. I chose PayPal as the payment method for as an easy and secure way of transferring the funds internationally.
I’d had the option to accept credit card payments in PayPal, which didn’t bother me at the time as the transaction was quick and I saw the funds instantly. However, what I didn’t know, and I found out the hard way was that I really wasn’t protected by PayPal and that the client can easily reverse the transaction.
The project was running relatively smoothly. The client was a bit of a strange one, flipping from being unreasonable and rude to ecstatic with my design concepts and actually asked me to marry him, multiple times. I was being paid, so I could tolerate the rudeness and I remained goal focused to get the project finished.
It got to the end of the project and I’d completed everything I had quoted on and I was working per hour for some extra content page customisation when he asked me to copy a competitor’s page into his site. I suggested that I need non-copyrighted content and I’ll design the page around that. He took it as insulting and began to threaten me, saying “you’re not the only designer on the face of the earth” and that he’ll hire someone else. At that point, I’d had enough; I had finished everything he initially contracted me to do so I made the decision to drop him as a client and wished him luck in finding a new designer. I was behind a few hours in payment but cut my losses and installed the full templated site on his server, handed over all the layered Photoshop files and left it at that.
Continue Reading...Source and Contributors:
- How Do You Invoice Your Clients? by Kristen King http://www.inkthinkerblog.com/2008/03/12/how-do-you-invoice-your-clients/
- Freelancers Beware of Receiving Payments via Credit Card through PayPal by Cara Williams http://freelanceswitch.com/the-business-of-freelancing/freelancers-beware-of-receiving-payments-via-credit-card-through-paypal/
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