4 ms·

If you are collecting 5k at a time, you are doing it wrong. Your client should not be holding more than 1,000 of your money at a time.

• blhack 10y ago
  $1000 is what a well paid software consultant makes in about a day. I can't think of a single person that does daily payments for consulting, and I feel like this would be a huge red flag if they asked for it.
  • devoply 10y ago
    That's a very small portion of the market.
    • Justin_K 10y ago
      You aren't charging enough.
      • devoply 10y ago
        I am not talking about me, we are talking about freelancers in general. That's a huge market filled significantly with the lower end.
• tptacek 10y ago
  Serious consultancies routinely have 6-7 figure receivables from individual clients. Why should indie consultants handicap themselves?
  • enraged_camel 10y ago
    We are a "serious consultancy." The only clients we have large figure receivables with are long-term clients our owner has a personal relationship with. All other clients (over 90% of them) are billed immediately and all bills are due in 30 days. At the end of the day it's a matter of how much risk you can afford. I would never hold it against a freelancer if they wanted to get paid right away.
    • morgante 10y ago
      What do you mean by "billed immediately?" $5,000 is maybe a week of work. I'm generally not billing more than once a week.
      • enraged_camel 10y ago
        It depends on the terms of payment. For example, for some of our projects we collect 50% of payment upfront and 50% upon project completion. The client is "billed immediately" at those times. We also have "open-ended" projects where the client can use our services on an ad-hoc (as opposed to per project) basis. For those, we bill the client once a month, on the last day of the month.
        • tptacek 10y ago
          In high-dollar consulting, up-front payment is a super weird term. Friends and acquaintances ask me for sanity checks on bids and pricing and deal structure all the time. If I ever see "pay me up front", I red-flag. If you're dealing with a client where you feel you really need a safety deposit, that's a sign from the universe that they shouldn't be your client. Do what you need to when you're just getting started, I get it. But try to move away from the kind of work where you get paid half up front, as soon as you can.
          • morgante 10y ago
            I disagree. Most of my clients pay each milestone upfront (they pay for the first milestone before work begins). Gigster has also built a pretty sizable business with this payment model.
            • tptacek 10y ago
              Your experience is different from mine, but I've definitely done mid-high six figure single contract deals where my team worked for a month and a half, fully delivered, and then sent off an invoice and "hoped" --- though "hope" didn't really play into it, because in srs bzns, when people get an invoice for a project for which they signed a SOW with a price tag on it, they pay. I have no doubt there is a class of client for which this isn't true, but: don't work with those clients. Good rule of thumb: if the median HN reader has heard of a company, that company cannot afford to stiff consultants.