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lessons in getting paid....
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in the past few months i’ve had two contrasting payment experiences which i’d like to share.
Client #1 (editorial) was highly communicative and involved in all aspects of the shoot, art direction, and logistics from start to finish. a real pleasure to work with. Even though both the art director and assigning editor went on maternity leave / holidays during the shoot and post production, I still received payment about 2 weeks after invoicing, and everyone was happy. Good vibes all around.
Client #2 (corporate) made a request for a location shoot which required flights and other additional expenses on very short notice (about 24 hrs). when I arrived, the company’s reps on location had not organized anything, and it was not possible to shoot what had been agreed upon. I had to come up with something on the spot which I was not happy with but best that could be done under the circumstances. I submitted my invoice and waited. And waited. And waited. Then I started a continuous stream of gentle but firm emails which became increasingly firm and decreasingly gentle until VOILA! 4 months after the shoot I received payment.
Lessons learned:
Client #1 was professional, organized, and communicative from the start. They also regularly work with photographers. It was not surprising that they paid on time. Client #2 was the opposite, and rarely hire photographers. I should have suspected difficulty in getting paid, and had some sort of strategy in place. That strategy will now come in the form of a late-payment clause in all my future contracts, stating an additional xx% will be added to the bill with late payment. After reading a lot of posts on LS about late payments, I’d suggest people do the same if they haven’t already. If the client won’t agree to such a clause, figure something else out to protect yourself, or don’t work with them. I’m lucky I got paid, and persistence is the key, but the time I spent hounding Client #2 should have been billable hours, and a simple clause in my contract would have likely sped things along in the first place.
by
Julian Abram Wainwright
at
Wed Oct 31 03:49:16 UTC 2007
(ed. Mar 12 2008)
Hanoi,
Vietnam
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bro you sent that money you owe me to my account yet?
ha! i kill myself sometimes.
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A good thing is to call twice a week.
I one had a very difficult client that was on the verge of refusing to pay. He even tried to make me angry (a common meathod to put some on e to the side in the bill stack)
I politely called him every thursday and tuseday for three weeks. Every time He said I dont have the money. I said o.k call you again thursday. And so on and so on. He was so happy to pay me at last and get wrid of those phonecalls.
Do not gve the client reason to get angry at you for being persistant in geting paid.
But it is my experience that highly prepared clients are faster payers as they know what they are getting into and have set a side the payment when going into the job.
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Kristjan,
You have inspired me to send a revised invoice to a business who infringed my copyright as they have not responded at all to my revised request by e-mail after an exchange of e-mails. They claimed that an elderly gentleman took the image without noticing my copyright notice. “He does not remember where he got the image”, so no one can check out whether he was telling the truth.
My theory is that the popular use of microstock images encourages copyright infringements rather than prevents it. If you are a legitimate business with enough profits, almost free prices and completely free prices with some of the images used make a little difference in the image expenses in their accounting.
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That sucks Tomoko. Sounds like a really lame excuse to me. I think I would give them one last chance to pay then hit them with a solicitor’s letter warning them of your intention to sue for breach of your copyright.
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Daniel,
I have seen the article. My problem is that I cannot sue now since I did not register the image before the infringement took place.
I am stating this here because I want others to learn from my mistake of not registering the image in time.
I read this evening at the ASMP site that the registration is not required to sue in other countries, but I live in the US and the business I have to deal with is in the US.
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