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Getting reluctant clients to pay
Submitted by crispy on Wed, 01/24/2007 - 07:26
Rim, I know you're pretty aquainted with ways to get stingy clients to pay what they owe - I thought this would be a very useful topic for us freelancers. I'd love to hear how everyone deals with it.
There are a few different stages as I see it:
The civil/friendly reminder phase - usually at this stage they're still taking your calls and answering your emails. And if they're not sharks you hopefully get paid at this point.
Then there's the grey area of when to switch into the next phase of action. I reckon this usually has a lot to do with how healthy your bank account is and if they've been taking your calls. You can decide to write it off but if the invoice is large that's not really an option - so what is the next step?
There should also be a site where bad payers get blacklisted.
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It can cause a lot of grief if a client doesn't pay for something they should. There are clients who will exploit the fact that you are a freelancer.
I think getting a commitment to pay you at a certain date is the best way to work out when to move onto stage 2 and hassle. If they fail to make good on their word or you repeat yourself then you no longer need to be friendly. Just polite and pressing.
There is a place to list defaulters. If you list them on Baycorp then they are more likely to be caused inconvenience and it's reputable. Publishing client details on a website somewhere could land you a law suit.
http://www.baycorp.com.au/
Have a good contract and scope document. For a new client require a deposit up-front, and have key milestones that correspond with deliverables. Don't handover anything until each milestone is paid.
I haven't had any bad experiences with clients, but I still go through these procedures.
charging interest and fronting them
I had several really slow payers so charged them interest. That pushed one along quite quickly to settle accounts. The other one ignored that so I just visited their town and fronted their house and they paid in 2 days. The court system favours slow payers and takes months to resolve tying up resources to fight them.
shut down
If I am running their mail server I shut that down (after they have ignored all warnings and I have run out of patience). People won't tolerate their email not working so it resolves the situation quickly. Sometimes within an hour or so.
But you don't tell them you're going to shut them down until you do it. In fact, I wait for them to find out themselves. You have to act quickly so they cannot work around your tactics by redelegating the domain or something.
And making direct threats takes away your element of surprise while forcing you down a certain path. If your client doesn't know what you're going to do then it makes things harder for them. Instead of saying "I'll contact my lawyer" you say something like "Someone else will solve this problem from now on". That could be a Solicitor with a BMW and a Blackberry or an ageing Rugby Player with a cordless power drill. Who knows?
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