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Freelance copywriter invoice template for Public Relations

as a freelance writer or any freelancer for that matter you need to be asking to get paid up front that means you have to ask them to pay you before you start doing any work for the client some freelancers ask for a hundred percent of the payment before they start working personally i ask for a 50 percent deposit meaning i do not start working until i have sent them an invoice reflecting 50 of the total amount of the invoice this protects you as a freelancer because unfortunately with online work with freelance work with contract work people cannot always be relied upon to come through with the payment this is happening to me right now and i want to share with you the situation so you can understand how these dynamic dynamics work but also how to protect yourself so i just started working for a customer success platform and i don't think they really have it all together in their content department which is fine they're going through a lot of changes however i was assigned about five blog posts i invoice them 50 up front meaning i get introduced to their finance department and send my invoice before i begin writing and i basically laid out my process hey i'm going to send you these outlines for this work please approve the outline so i know that i'm on the right track before i go down this road of writing all this long-form content so i spend a good i'm gonna say three days outlining because if you guys have heard me talk about my writing process outlining long-form content is actually the most long the most lengthy part of the writing process people think the actual writing is the long part really it's the outlining it's getting all of the information that you're going to include into these outlines and as a content writer it really is a best practice to get approval from your client at least in the beginning when the relationship is new you want to get approval to make sure that you don't write 3 000 words and then find out that it's all wrong so i spend about three days creating these outlines and i send them his way and i said please let me know if i can start writing and i never hear back i'm going to say two weeks goes by so i start sending emails hey are we still on for this do you still want to work with me silence silence silence um finally get an email back hey i'm so sorry we've been going through this going through that uh i'm just so overwhelmed which by the way i was a content lead briefly in-house full-time so actually i can empathize that some content people the people who employ us as freelancers have so much going on that it's very easy to lose communication with a freelancer it's not personal a lot of the times it's really just they are so overwhelmed with all these other priorities so it's not personal and i understand that so i said okay that's fine another week goes by i still do not have approval on these uh outlines so now instead of reaching out to him i'm pinging his finance department hey i need 50 of this paid i realize that you have not paid me yet and i need 50 of this invoice and why that's so important is because now i'm covering myself because i spent three days outlining these blog posts that took a lot of information a lot of time a lot of research a lot of effort and that was time that i couldn't spend doing work for other clients prospecting and searching for new clients so it's costing me money to sit there and do work for them and the mistake a lot of freelancers make is that they start working so they can't work for other clients they can't search for other clients they can't invest that time back into their business and they haven't even been paid yet so the 50 deposit protects you and it says okay even if this client ghosts it is still on record that they owe me 50 it also incentivizes the client to be a better communicator and say okay well we've paid her a couple thousand dollars now i it's probably my best interest to start answering her so i'm relieved that i got 50 of my money even though i'm still not in communication with the client right now i'm getting paid a couple thousand dollars just for outlines okay it's not great it's not pushing the relationship forward with the client but at least i covered my ass now i want to explain to you how you can request this 50 deposit but let me see what people are saying this is for clients that know me and i've worked with you before and know what i can do and can afford it um yeah okay but actually i'm not sure what you mean by that but i will say no matter who you're working with request 50 up front the only time i don't request 50 up front is if i'm on retainer and we are now on this constant um monthly basis where things are constantly changing a lot of my hourly clients uh sometimes i don't request 50 if it's just gonna be more work for me to constantly be invoicing than fifty percent but most of the time ninety percent of the time you want to ask for fifty percent up front and if you think fifty percent is aggressive just understand that there's clients or there's freelancers that ask their clients for a hundred percent upfront so i want to explain to you i want to share with you how you can word this because i have an email pulled up right now so i'm doing work with this company um i'm gonna be writing this like story for them basically it's like i'm doing interviewing it's a whole thing and the whole project is like 1400 bucks and uh she reached out to me and she said hey i'm gonna be assigning you this project here's the deadline and i said okay great looking forward to it i'm gonna invoice you 50 percent please let me know what your process is with your finance department and she said we didn't discuss the 50 deposit in voice so can you explain that a bit more i typically request an invoice when the assignment is complete and then i send it to our finance team who processes it and sends a check we could certainly look at a deposit process just interested to learn more first so me uh from my perspective i'm like okay i know i have to put my foot down and actually explain why but in the back of my mind i'm thinking like damn she could come back and be like you know what we're not comfortable with this never mind so you have to understand you're taking that risk when you draw boundaries not everyone is going to agree to your boundaries but this is this 50 deposit thing is really really important for me especially right now and i'm going to explain why and i actually explained it to her in this email so this is what i'm i wrote back to her and i had to sit there for a minute i'm like how do i word this delicately hi cr oh i don't know what's her name the 50 deposit just protects me as a contractor because clients in the past have unfortunately stopped corresponding halfway through engagements especially now as turnover and layoffs have been sweeping tech please let me know if you have any questions about this and i look forward to working with you what was her response sure makes sense i appreciate the additional context i'll be in touch with you next week with more info welcome aboard i was like oh my god yes so i understand guys that it could be nerve wracking to draw that boundary and tell them what you need but i'm urging you to protect yourself because even if you're not in tech like i am where like people are just getting laid off left and right and we're all facing a certain degree of economic uncertainty and layoffs and turnover i mean even before we were quote unquote in a recession there was so much turnover so the unfortunate thing is is that you could be doing work for clients and you will completely lose contract they will drop off you will get ghosted and i've seen other freelancers talking about this too like i don't understand i got ghosted honestly it happens a lot i have been ghosted sometimes by clients that i worked for for more than a year so you think you have a relationship established but it's very easy to ghost people in the online world where you are not showing up to an office so protect yourself request fifty percent upfront and do not begin working and investing time into clients unless you have it on the books that they owe you fifty percent they might not pay you before you start writing okay let me make that little disclaimer because sometimes that will push the timeline way back my payment terms are net 15 and most clients respect my payment terms do not ask for net 30 net 60 a lot of these clients will come to you and say oh we do net 30 net 90 net 60 no net 15 meaning you please get to work on my invoice and send it to your finance department as soon as you get it so that i can get paid these things do take time so i'm not suggesting that you just like completely stop writing until you have this check hit your your bank however at least cover your bases by having it on the books that this company owes you 50 and i hate to say this too because it's gonna sound is potentially could be taken the wrong way but i'm very hesitant to do business with uh companies that are not headquartered in the us or the uk for this exact reason i have done it i've worked for israeli companies but with those situations because i've been burned and i have not been paid by those companies and there's all these issues with wire transfers and wire fees and all this stuff uh i tend to try to stick with companies that i can take to small claims court if they screw me so that's not like a oh i don't want to work with foreign companies no no i'm more than happy to work with any company that's going to pay me money if i cannot hold you accountable if you shaft me if i can not take you to small claims court i'm putting myself at risk and most companies when they are threatened with small claims court will just pay up so that they don't have to go through that legal process i actually have uh email templates at paidcopyrider.com that you can download so that you can stop chasing invoices in general if you lay it down in the beginning of the relationship by wording things correctly in your emails you can avoid so many payment issues and i have a template that actually shows you if they are not paying you and they are not responding to you i want you to keep a paper trail of every interaction you've had with them and then i have an email template that you can plug that information into and when that client sees a list of everything that you've kept track of hey i invoiced you on this date here's what we agreed i emailed you on this day no answer i emailed you on this day no answer when they see that you are gathering proof it's scary to them and it pushes them to pay you we deserve to get paid and there are ways to do this so that you can salvage the relationship with the client because getting nasty and aggressive you can go that route but you're probably not going to work with them again a lot of this is about boundary setting and you know putting things delicately but being firm and as freelancers we need to be firm we need to draw boundaries we need to get paid and we need to state our our guidelines or our stipulations or our rules the way any business would do not think because you're a sole proprietor or you're a contractor that you can't demand you know that your contract stipulations be met just like any company requires you to pay by a certain date you're owed that too right people can pay their bills on time they owe you that so i hope this helped