You deserve to be paid with money, not excuses
10 ways to deal with clients who won't pay you (plus two of my very real experiences)
Hello friend,
The client was two months late paying me for articles I had written. She owed me around $1,500. I had already sent a few emails requesting payment and had stopped working on the project, which was to provide monthly articles for a new magazine.
She kept coming back with excuses why she couldn’t pay me and why I should continue on without payment. There was always a reason her finances were stretched.
“I’m sorry your finances are stretched thin, but I rely on my freelance income to pay my bills and I have a contract that states you’ll pay me for all work done in a month at the end of the month. I will not move forward with the next round of articles until I’ve been paid for the previous articles,” I wrote (surprisingly politely, given how frustrated I was at the time).
She stopped responding to my emails and phone calls. Then her phone line was disconnected. A few weeks later I drove by her office to discover it was no longer her office. It was like she had been a figment of my imagination, except that there were three other freelancers she owed money to as well.
No matter how long you’re a freelancer you will come up against clients who won’t pay you. I’m not talking about the clients who argue the work you did is subpar and doesn’t deserve payment (those are for a different post).
I’m talking about the kind who disappear. Who take your work and vanish, never to be heard from again, or to come back with excuse after excuse and delay after delay, but never any actual payment.
They waste your time and your energy. They make you suspicious of new clients. They make you question your sanity.
You can’t always guarantee that you’ll get paid 100% of what you’re owed for a project, but there are steps you can take to let potential clients know you’re serious about being paid (and being paid on time) and to ensure you get paid for at least some of the work you do.
But, and this is really important, you have to get comfortable with being firm. You have to be okay with being assertive and demanding that clients meet your reasonable expectations. You cannot shy away from this or you will wind up with more unpaid clients than you deserve.
Too often, freelancers—especially new ones—want to people please, so they struggle with getting tough. We come up with excuses on their behalf for why they might not have paid us yet. We worry if we come across as too tough, they’ll never work with us again. So we rationalize their behaviour and try to soft sell our way into payment. We let them off the hook before we even bring it up to them.
This lets bad clients get away with taking advantage of you. If they agreed to your terms and you provided the work, you’re owed the money. Full stop. No questions asked.
You’re not being a bother by demanding you get paid what you’re owed.
According to an article at Inc., as much as 16% of invoices don’t get paid. In my experience, the percentage is a lot lower, but that’s because I take steps to protect myself from unpaying clients.
Here are some important steps you can take to ensure you get paid, either in full or at least part of what you’re owed.
Charge a deposit. For any project over $500, I charge a deposit. The deposit varies depending on the size of the project but is typically between 1/3 and 1/2 the total cost. For new clients, if the project is less than $500 I charge the full amount up front. For clients I know, like and trust, I just charge the $500 at the end. But that’s for clients who have proven to be reliable.
Set a regular payment schedule so you are paid periodically based on meeting certain benchmarks. As soon as a payment is missed, stop work on the project until you’ve received your money.
Send a contract or a letter of agreement that requires their signature or an “I agree” email response (even a thumbs up nowadays can be considered a legally binding agreement).
Make it clear to the client that you charge interest on unpaid amounts (you have to state this in your contract or statement of work—otherwise, if you wind up in court you likely won’t be awarded interest on any amount owing).
Use an automated invoicing system that alerts you when someone is late making a payment. You can set up that system to send the client a reminder that their payment is overdue, or you can write a short reminder (keep a template handy so you don’t have to continually rewrite this email). The first reminder can be friendly—it’s possible they got busy and forgot because they are human. But each subsequent email needs to be shorter and firmer.
Set up your invoices so they’re easy to track. This is also why I love invoicing software, rather than doing it manually. I can see when clients have viewed my invoices. If the deadline is approaching and they haven’t even viewed the invoice, that’s a sign that perhaps it’s gone to the wrong email address or was pushed into spam. In that case, I send a quick, “Hi, I see you haven’t viewed invoice #1234 sent on July 1 yet. If you haven’t received it, please confirm the address I was meant to send it to and let me know if I need to resend it.” That usually gets them moving. Invoicing systems also give you tracking numbers so it’s easier for you to follow up.
Always send your final invoice with (or before) your final submission for the project. As soon as I’ve submitted my final piece of content, I go to my invoicing system and send the invoice. That lessens the chances either of us will forget about it. In my early days as a freelancer, I didn’t want to bother my clients so sometimes I waited weeks to send out an invoice. The thing is, good clients want the invoice right away so they can pay you. Don’t delay sending out your invoice. Some freelancers require final payment before they submit their final versions of the work.
Listen to your gut. There are warning signs (I’ll go into them) and when you see enough of them, your gut will tell you something is off. In the case of the magazine client, there had been a few moments when my radar alerted me that she might not be on the up and up, so as soon as she missed her payment, I stopped working on my next series of articles.
Meet with people, even over Zoom, before you work with them. This won’t tell you everything about them, but it will give you more of a feel for the human behind the client. It will also give you a better opportunity to watch for red flags. This is especially important if the client hasn’t come through your network, but instead found you online or through social media.
Don’t accept cheques as payment. These days, it’s easy for clients to pay through online invoicing systems; through PayPal, Stripe, or another payment system; through online e-transfer; or through credit card (via an online system). There are many ways they can pay you that don’t require mailing a cheque.
Bonus tip: Be clear with yourself about when you will and won’t take legal action. You can often go to small claims court (depending on where you live). In my case, I decided it wasn’t worth my time for that amount, given that she likely didn’t have the money and wouldn’t be able to pay anyhow, so I’d be wasting my valuable time.
What are some warning signs clients will pose a problem?
They seem incredibly disorganized (my unpaying client was very disorganized and used that as an excuse for all sorts of bad behaviour)
They only want to pay with a cheque
They undermine your value, saying things like “This is just a really small project that shouldn’t take you long” (sometimes the shortest projects take the longest to do)
Other freelancers had difficulty getting payment from them
They seem hesitant, indecisive, or otherwise behave in a manner that sets off alarm bells (I once rejected a client because he talked about refusing to pay a previous freelancer for work the freelancer had done)
They have unreasonable expectations
They refuse to pay a deposit (or argue about it)
They refuse to sign or agree in writing to a contract/letter of agreement
They fight against boundaries you set
They complain about your fees or try to get you to lower them (or they try to negotiate a lower price on the current work in exchange for a promise of future work)
They cut corners
I cannot stress enough how crucial it is for you to be firm about getting paid. It may not be comfortable for you; it wasn’t for me especially when I started charging deposits. But now I couldn’t imagine running my business without charging a deposit. It’s one of the best moves I’ve ever made in my business.
You may not like how you feel when you’re being assertive, but it’s far better than the feeling of not having the money you’re owed. Good clients will appreciate that you need to get paid. Bad clients will run the other way.
If you’re struggling to get payment from someone, you don’t want to work with them in the future so there’s no need to be overly friendly with them. It’s fine to be amicable at first—missed payments happen, even with the best clients. But if it’s dragging on for weeks, you need to get firm.
Embrace this from the first time you have a client who won’t pay and it will become much easier to do.
Have a series of email templates to cover non-payment so you don’t have to feel like the bad guy rewriting a new email every time. This makes it more likely you’ll send that email as soon as a payment is missed.
In my most assertive email ever, I was following up with a different client who hadn’t paid me for months after my work was completed. She responded to one of my emails with, “I’m sorry for the delay in responding, I was on vacation last week. We’re still finding the budget to pay you.”
To which I responded, “I’m really happy for you that you can afford to go on vacation. Perhaps if I were paid on time I could also afford to go on vacation. But I’m stuck waiting for you to pay me.”
She paid me the following week. And I never worked for her again.
Here’s to your freelance success!
Heidi