A Freelancer's Worst Nightmare - How to Get Clients to Pay

Working from home means the ability to organize your own time and dictate your own schedule - creature comforts like freedom to come and go as we please. There are huge perks to working at home, and those are what we tend to focus on when things are going well. When they don't, and payments fail to come through, it can make us question what we're doing in the first place.

Sadly, there's not always a lot you can do after the work has been performed. In the meantime, take a few steps to ensuring that you receive payment for future work and do the few things that you can do to try and get the delinquent client to pay up.

Advance Planning

Now that you've been bitten by the biggest we all face as freelancers, it's time to make sure that the liklihood of it happening again is very low.

First, you will want to look at the payment process you have in place. If at all possible, try to institute a new policy that requires 1/2 of the total payment on contract, the second 1/2 of total payment due upon delivery of the finished work. Sometimes, this simply isn't possible - but if you're accepting the projects, not soliciting them, then you have a lot more leeway in this respect.

If you are performing most of your freelance work via a freelance board like Guru.com, you won't be able to dictate the terms of payment. Instead, you will want to take a careful look at the policies your board has in place. Guru.com, for example, has a high success rate because they report so fully on any "contractors" who ask for work to be performed. All freelancers interested in the work a contractor has described are able to view how many payments the contractor has sent, how much money they have sent in total, and how much time on average has lapsed between invoice and payment made.