There is so much freedom that comes with being self-employed. You can take the kids to school, work after they go to bed, enjoy a day out during the middle of the week when places perhaps aren’t quite as busy. People sometimes ask me what the worst part of the self-employed life is.
Chasing invoices.
It seems like a lot of clients and companies don’t want to actually pay the ‘little guy’ who actually does a hell of a lot of work for them. I’ve had this issue a few times and a couple of clients decided not to send work in my direction after I re-sent outstanding invoices with an ‘unpaid invoice’ fee on top.
My one bit of advice if you are considering going self-employed or freelance, is to make sure your payments are received within your payment terms details on your invoice. If the payment isn’t in your account after that time, a friendly email usually helps to remind people but if nothing comes after that, be sure to send them an invoice with extra charges.
We all have bills to pay and can’t afford to be missing invoices and ending up with overdraft payments because of it. I often think that clients should put themselves in the shoes of people they owe money to now & again. What would they do if their monthly paycheque didn’t land in their account when it should?
It’s hard because we sometimes feel like we’ll annoy the clients by chasing them for payments and we need the work to survive, but who needs work that doesn’t actually pay?
