The two things that I see chase more otherwise good writers out of the freelance writing business are an inability to meet deadlines, and an inability to send out timely invoices. Writing an invoice for freelance writing work is easy for one client, but more complicated when you have several clients.
Invoicing Freelance Writing Clients
Getting paid for freelance writing is a lot like running a bar. Your customers can either pay for each project submitted right away, or they can run a tab.
For one-off clients generally, the submission of the project is the invoice. Once submitted, the client should pay the agreed-upon price.
Ongoing clients typically run a tab. As you submit each freelance writing project deliverable, the client will reply with edits or thanks. However, they won’t pay every time you submit an assignment. Instead, you keep track of what you have submitted and then when they are ready to close out their tab, you charge them for all of their drinks at once, metaphorically speaking.
Most clients prefer monthly invoices where you send them an invoice at the end of the month that encompasses everything that you submitted during the month. Sometimes this is comically inefficient where you send a whole invoice for two assignments for $100, or whatever. Other times, it’s a full-scale effort where you have to invoice for daily posts or multiple invoices per day and you start asking yourself, “Do I submit a two-page invoice, or do I submit two invoices?”
End of the Month Invoicing
Most of my clients want an invoice at the end of the month. In fact, many of my clients need the invoice on the last day of the month, while also wanting that invoice to include all of my freelance writing submitted during the month. Practically speaking, that means that I have to create the invoice on the last day of the month, after submitting all projects for the month and then submitting the invoice.
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If you have more than a few clients, this can end up taking most of your last day of the month working hours– or at least it seems that way. This is the reason why I recommend to new freelance writers, or freelance writers looking for tips to complete any writing assignments by the penultimate day of the month, leaving the last day of the month for invoicing.
How To Make an Invoice for Freelance Writing Work
New freelancers tend to overcomplicate invoicing. There is no secret trick for how to write an invoice for freelance writing. Your clients won’t be impressed by your invoice design skills. In fact, many of your invoices will simply be forwarded to someone in accounting whose job it is to pay all of the invoices the company receives. That person is interested in speed, not cleverness. Pick a basic freelance writing invoice template in Word, fill in the necessary information and fire it off. You can find freelance writing invoice examples for Word and Google Docs all over the internet.
Then, and this is REALLY important, keep track of when your invoices get paid. I have enough experience these days that I can usually detect flakes and scammers before we get too far in the freelance writing relationship, but that doesn’t mean that legitimate clients always pay on time. Invoices get lost. Accounting demands more and your contact hasn’t gotten around to it. Financial troubles mean they are trying to pay you later than usual. If you don’t track your invoice submissions and your invoice gets lost at your client, you may never get paid, not because they are trying to stiff you, but because it just dropped through the cracks. I’ve seen freelancers who just assume they are getting all of their invoices paid end up missing out on hundreds of dollars because they didn’t notice that a client never paid.
Usually, all it takes is a polite follow-up email asking if there was a problem. When your clients know that you haven’t been paid, they usually move to fix it. After all, they want to keep receiving your quality product.
The Mini-Vacation
Here is the good news.
If you don’t schedule work on the last day of the month, and you have all your records together, and you’ve gotten pretty fast at generating and submitting invoices, you can get a little mini-vacation on the 30th or 31st after your submissions are done.
Today, I’m getting one heck of a mini-vacation because I cheated and pre-generated some invoices by assuming which freelance writing projects I would complete during the month. Maybe that’s a good freelance writing tip for me to write up… next time… I’m on mini-vacation 🙂