Of Invoicing and Late Fees

Lori Widmer, freelance writer, has a nifty article on establishing a routine for invoicing clients. She’s right, however you get the billing done, it should be automatic.

I don’t keep many paper files, so although my plan is similar, it’s all on my computer. For example, I blog twice a week for Senior BofI; I invoice them twice a month, on the first and 15th, more or less. I place the invoice dates on my calendar. When I create the invoice, I file it in a folder called strangely enough “invoices.” This client has their own folder, and I save each using the date of invoicing as the file name. Then I email it as an attachment to the client. It’s easy to run down the filenames and see if I’ve skipped any… which I did once. So I created an invoice showing both the missed period and the new one, explained what I’d done in the body of the email and it was no problem at all.

When I’m dealing with a new client, I’ll also create an entry in my calendar about 15 days after the invoice saying something like: Have I received the $xxx from so-and-so. Once the client establishes a consistent payment, I don’t continue to make this entry every time… although maybe I should.

Some of my clients don’t require invoices, but I often do them anyway just to keep my records straight.

When a check comes in, it gets logged in my Quicken in the Business Checking account. Again, this makes it fairly easy to figure out who has paid and who hasn’t.

I haven’t added late fees to my contracts, but you know what? I’m going to. Just because I haven’t had much problem in this area doesn’t mean I shouldn’t put everyone on notice as it were.

Here’s an article I wrote ages ago called How to Create an Invoice for Your Freelance Writing Clients. I’m always surprised at how many people actually use this page… and not all writers either.

Write well and often,

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