Freelance Switch

The Freelancer’s Cheat Sheet for Collections

Posted: 03 Mar 2011 04:00 AM PST

Credit: Olle Svensson on Flickr

Collections — even the mention of that word puts a sad look on any freelancer’s face. We’ve all wound up with a client who simply failed to pay up. The simple truth is that we’ll probably see more down the road, as well.

There’s no set signals that we can look for that will tell us if a given client will pay or not. There are certainly plenty of jerks out there, but there are also plenty of people who just find that their own cash flow didn’t work out the way they expected. You’ve got to be willing to act on the problem, either way, rather than sitting around hoping that they’ll cut you a check some day. Here are concrete options that you can take.

Keep contacting your client: It’s true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you keep calling, sending notices of unpaid invoices and generally staying in close contact, you may get money just to make you go away. Provided that you’re polite about it, feel free to make a nuisance of yourself — such as by calling their office every day until you get paid.
Offer new payment terms: If the situation is such that you know your client is willing to pay but just can’t right now, offer new payment terms. Tell the client that you’ll take payments spread out over time or some other arrangement. Don’t make it a habit, though.
Ask a lawyer to write a letter: While you have to be able to back up a lawyer’s letter to make it truly effective, just hearing that you’re willing to get a lawyer involved can be very motivating to clients who need to send you money.
Visit your client’s office: It’s much harder to tell someone that they’re not going to get their money in a fact-to-face situation and, if you’re willing to sit down and refuse to move until you receive payment, you may be able to get it. Be careful how you handle such situations, however — depending on the circumstances, the owner of the office you’re visiting can call the cops and report you for trespassing or causing a disturbance.
Take them to small claims court: Provided that your client is located fairly near to you, it may make sense to simply take the matter to court. If it’s a sizable project, it may be worth traveling in order to bring the matter in front of a judge.
Ask the client to return the work: If the client hasn’t paid for the work, he shouldn’t be using it. Some clients will continuing using work anyhow, but that opens them up to questions of copyright infringement since they haven’t properly licensed the work. I wouldn’t do it except in extreme cases, but that means that you can send a take down notice to their ISP if they’re using your work online.

No matter how frustrated you are about an unpaid invoice, you never want to open yourself up for legal action. You absolutely have to take the high road: don’t bad mouth your client, take any of their property or even make a scene at their offices. All those situations open you up to legal action — you may get your payment, but it could get eaten up by your own legal fees. The trick is to be persistent but polite, no matter what.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Olle Svensson.

Blinksale: Invoicing Service Review

Posted: 02 Mar 2011 04:00 AM PST

Blinksale

Starting out on your freelancing career can be a daunting task for just about anyone. From registering your business name to setting up your accounts, there can be a lot of stress when making those first important decisions.

One question the FreelanceSwitch forum gets frequently asked is: what should you use to invoice your clients? So we thought we would take a look at one straightforward invoicing service called – Blinksale.

What is Blinksale?

Blinksale calls itself "the easiest way to send invoices online." But of course that's all just a lot of marketing talk.

What Blinksale does, and does well, is let you put together a simple invoice and send it off via email to a client. It's a no-frills, straightforward system for invoicing.

Blinksale is not going to be your complete accounting package. If you are looking for keeping track of expenses and other details for taxes, then this is not for you. However, if you are just getting your feet wet with freelancing and need a professional looking way to bill your clients, Blinksale will fit nicely.

How it Works

Blinksale comes with a 30 day free trial, so go ahead and give it a spin to see how you like it.

Should you decide to not stick with the service, Blinksale will allow you to export the invoices you've made during your 30 day trial. That's a pretty nice feature.

Invoice creation is extremely easy. Although Blinksale is not a robust accounting program, being clearly focused on invoicing makes for an uncluttered and clean interface. There shouldn't be much head scratching putting together your first invoice.

The dashboard allows you to create a new invoice or estimate, as well as add new clients or check previous payments or invoices.

Blinksale Invoice

Adding a new client is as simple as starting a new invoice and clicking on Add a new client…

Units of billing can either be in hours, days or by products or services. You can also pick your currency of billing as well as set any sales tax or freight charges that need to be applied.

Payment terms and late fees can also be easily set during the invoice creation stage.

Another nice feature is the recurring invoice option if you have the same invoice going out to particular clients every month.

After you've completed the invoice it is saved to your account, but it is not emailed yet. In your invoice dashboard you can make changes to the invoice or even preview it (exactly as the client will see it).

Blinksale Invoice

Clients are given the option to forward, print, download, or even make comments on the invoice.

If everything looks ready to go, the invoice can be emailed to the client as either a HTML email or a PDF attachment.

Blinksale email

From here, a client can either send you a check or use a different payment method you've arranged ahead of time. If that sounds like a bit of a hassle, the good news is Blinksale has recently launched their credit card payment service called Blinkpay. It wasn't available when I reviewed the product so I can't comment on how easy it is to use or what kind of fees they are charging, but it should go a long way to simplifying the payment process.

Once payment has been made, simply click on a receive payment button to record the payment and file the invoice. At this time a note can also be sent to your client to thank them for their payment.

Invoices are saved and are made available for export to XML or Excel format when you need them for tax preparation (although the export feature kept throwing up errors when I tried it out).

It's also possible to integrate Blinksale with Basecamp if you so desire.

Pricing

Blinksale has gone in a bit of a different direction than other invoice services. Instead of setting a limit on how many clients you can have, you're billed on your allotment of invoices for the month.

Good news if you have a lot of different clients but don't send out a lot of invoices a month.

Blinksale Pricing

The Bronze pack is probably a little light for most freelancers, allowing only 6 invoices in a month. I would expect most would fall in the $12 – $24 a month range. I'm not sure what company would be paying $99 a month for unlimited invoices a month and not have decided on a complete accounting package like Quickbooks, or something similar.

Conclusion

Services like Blinksale fill a growing niche of new online business owners or freelancers that need a quick and easy way to start billing their clients. However, as your business grows, you may find yourself needing to change to a complete accounting service that does more than just look after invoicing.

While there are a few features I would like to see, such as bad-debt recording and the ability to save repeatedly used products or services, Blinksale really makes it a piece of cake to both make and send invoices.

Give it a spin for 30 days by signing up on their website.

Blinksale Comment Giveway

The folks at Blinksale were nice enough to give us a year subscription to a Gold, Silver and Bronze account as prizes. Please leave a comment on this article to enter your name into a random draw. Envato employees and writers are unfortunately not eligible.

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Kamis, 03 Maret 2011