Here are five unique tips on how to get your freelance work bills paid on time.
As background, I have never had a client not pay me. I learned from fellow consultants that this is stunningly rare. A website designer in Austin told me once, typically every consultant gets stiffed for at least $5,000. Well after a decade, I have not.
Celebrating 10 years in Business
I'm happy to report that I'm in my tenth year anniversary as a public relations or PR consultant. I've enjoyed 35 clients including PR agencies Alexa PR, Aircover Communications, Global Fluency (Founder is Donovan Neale-May), and Hoffman Agency. I worked for large brand name and unicorn tech clients through these agencies. Early in my career I was a full timer at Neale-May and Partners for three years and 'had a cup of coffee' with WE working for Microsoft.
I have mostly done freelance media relations working directly with startup CEOs and CMOs. A few hired me for social media campaigns, content writing and marketing communications, e.g., I wrote and edited a couple of websites. One client added me to its advisory board.
What has changed in PR in the past decade?
There are more non journalists who write content that gets wide pickup, and actual journalists are way over pitched and sometimes can't even get to reading your email because they have too many assignments.
Good PR people can overcome these challenges.
A business writer told me he has to file five stories a day. Imagine if you had to do that for a college English class. Do the math. Five stories a day times five business days. That's 25 quality, researched and fact-checked essays per week! A quality PR freelancer or agency team can communicate in such a way that gets coverage.
Once you do PR for a company or person, what can you do to make sure you get paid at all, and on time? Here are five tips:
- Tag on a late fee. Don't be afraid to tell someone who just hired you or plans to hire you that if payment is significantly late, that you are going to charge a late fee. Notify them ahead of time, not after it's late. Ten percent is fair. I had a visual data analytics client that ran out of funds while waiting on new VC funding. The CFO told me that because of my late fee, I was literally getting paid first among the list of vendors.
- Assign a number to each invoice. If you assign each a number, accounts payable knows how to intelligently refer to each invoice later if there is a problem. I had a minor issue with a longtime European client. Assigning invoice numbers can be a life saver time wise. Why? If you label it just "February invoice" you can't quickly tell if it's for work performed that month or the one prior. And which February of which year? I had sent them 60 invoices over five years. Once a European bank started tagging on big money transfer fees after three years. I billed the fees back to the client and they said, why? (Note that when you get paid, sometimes PayPal or the bank just subtracts money. I've seen $17 to $150 taken off.) The flummuxed client agreed to reimburse me but I had to refer to which invoice the money applied to. I did not speak the language of the fee charger so I called my bank to figure out what they thought happened. They guessed there was a money exchange fee between banks in two European countries. If that were the case, why would that mean a fee on our ends? Why would they exchange money and then send it to me? To simplify this tip, if a client in another country wants to pay you via PayPal, wire or transfer, check the fee before you agree. Don't assume it's low.
- Add a results report but only if it's okayed: Don't assume that the person receiving the invoice knows what you did. You might work for the senior account director but send the invoice to the executive vice president for example. Also, one client told me to not share the results report with the billing person. She wanted me to use exact wording on that every time so it was easier and faster to process. Re: reports, I have referred back to them many times for other purposes. I do think that the CFOs appreciate the details.
- Use a service like Bill. As an aside, I recently signed up as a Bill (formerly Bill.com) user and recommend it for freelance invoices. They only charge a 1% fee if you want to get paid super fast. It was wicked fast signing up. Use Chrome or Edge browser. Bill was my client through Aircover agency so it was extremely cool to try out the service.
- Get creative to avoid spending hours problem solving. I comped an early stage startup because solving the billing problem would have cost me a lot of time. A CEO from London asked me for a meeting. I gave him some really good launch advice. He insisted on paying me for two hours. We disagreed on how I'd get paid. I didn't want to give a stranger my bank account number for the transfer. We had no mutual friends and he didn't have a LinkedIn photo. Due to the low amount of dollars, I said, I waive the fee, and have a great day. Otherwise it would have cost me 10 more hours and a lot of stress.
In summary, employ smart invoice and accounting practices from the start. Thinking that the worst can happen will help you get paid, and on time.
Good luck to all of the new freelancers out there.
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Michelle McIntyre is a Silicon Valley PR consultant, IBM vet and the new head of editorial content at PRSA Silicon Valley. @fromMcIntyre
