A recent article in Crain's stated that 42% of New York's independent workers had difficulties getting paid last year, and that 14% were never paid at all. According to the article, this added up to $4.7 billion in lost wages.
I'm sure many (if not all) of you have had trouble collecting from a client at some point. Getting clients to pay can take anything from a nudge to legal action, but it's all part of being a freelancer (and the job of accountant that goes along with that). Do you have clients that don't pay? How have you collected? Please share in the comments and answer the poll below.
In today’s environment and society we live in you need to be nicely aggressive to get paid. Persistency is the key and understanding stepping up pressure as it goes along helps to keep your AR down. It is ashame but that is what we are faced with these days.
We’ve found the only way to ensure payment is to write expectations and consequences in the proposal/client contract for clients billed on monthly retainer services, and C.O.D. on any creative going to media or print before final art is sent… I now that sounds a little stiff, but we’ve not suffered any measurable loss of work since implementing that and the stress of late/no pays has gone way down.