Billing and translation - an uneasy match

A much debated side of the freelance translation industry is what happens after you have translated. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as sending
an invoice and wait for payment, because the general business attitude towards cash-flow is as follows: get incoming payments in as fast as
possible and delay outgoing payments as long as possible. This sounds crude but believe me, I worked in Credit and Collections prior to my
venturing on the path of a freelance translator and that is an unwritten and unspoken rule which many companies seem to live by. Have you
ever wondered why accounts payable departmens have sometimes very difficult to understand people when you call them? Can you call them at
all to begin with? Do they send an automated reply asking not to contact them within an x amount of days before following up? These are
examples of what I call payment barriers, partly designed to delay payments of invoices. One company I tried to collect from in that previous
career even bluntly stated that all invoices were ignored until people started to ask for payment! How cute...

The ideal situation for many freelance translators is a large client base of direct clients who pay promptly and timely. Quite a lot of translators
are in that happy situation. However, many freelance translators are at the end of a supply chain: Client > Translation agency A > (optional:
translation agency B) > translator and often this is the case with several clients. There is nothing wrong with this situation, but it can cause a few
problems here and there, depending on your own success in selling your services and your ability to keep track of it all.

The main problem: every client has their own terms and conditions and you probably have your own as well. They also all have their own
payment policy as well as their own purchasing policy. Keeping track of all that may become very time consuming, although it should in my
opinion never take more time than the actual translating itself. I don’t use any software package but with a few speadsheets I have it, in theory,
set up properly so that I always know how much I have invoiced, what the payment delay for each invoice is and therefore in theory an
expected payment date.

I say in theory, because being at the end of the food chain supply chain is not the strongest position to command that agencies live up to their
obligations. Nowadays you have to be careful making reasonable demands: before you know it the assignments all of a sudden do not come
anymore and while that in itself is not a bad thing: no assignments also means no income. Having said that, there are situations where you have
to weigh the balance: if a client comes back on what is indicated in Purchase Orders regarding payment delay, you have to ask yourself if that
relationship is worth pursuing any further. Personally I think that, if there is no other income, it is is better to have a slowly paying client than no
client at all. I also think that if you have more clients, it is better to prioritize the faster paying clients over the slower paying clients.

If I can lend any credibility to the multitude of discussion fora for translators, finance is probably not the strongest point of the average freelance
translator but, same as almost anybody can learn to sell by following a sales protocol, collecting your invoices can also be learned - to a certain
extent. There are a few basics that anybody can implement and I will list a few below. Not all of them may apply to all situations and they are
certainly not the holy grail in collecting your invoices, but they may help or be an addition to your current collection activities.

1. make sure your invoices are clear and comply with relevant legislation
This sounds silly but it is a fact of life that many invoices are unclear. Ask yourself this: if you receive an invoice and it is not totally clear why it
was sent to you, do you simply pay it or do you ask what the invoice is all about? Given the opening paragraph of this article: will your clients
contact you if they don’t understand your invoice? I think not. This is not the place to tell what makes an invoice clear but the bare minimum
would be the invoice date, the ultimate payment delay in days or a ‘please pay by’ date, the bank account details you want the payment to be
sent to, your contact details and your VAT-number if you have one. It is, of course, also necessary to indicate what you are invoicing, at which
rate, when it was ordered (and the order method - indicate a Purchase Order number if you have one) and when it was delivered.

2. keep track of your invoices diligently

As indicated earlier, this does not have to be done through accounting software, a few spreadsheets will do just as well. From personal
experience I can say that if you base your invoice numbers on the issuing date, it is relatively difficult to run out of invoice numbers AND you can
see in one glance when the invoice was sent. You can also see in that same spreadsheet if an invoice is paid, when it was or is due for payment
and what currency the invoice is in (I have clients all over the world and some prefer to pay in their own currency). Believe it or not, in a forum I
once read a post about an owner of a small translation agency, who said that approximately 15% of the work he received from freelancers was
never invoiced by them. Easy money for him!

3. have a set of standard reminders available

This is important for at least two reasons. First of all: you don’t want to be writing an email or letter each time an invoice is overdue. With
standard letters and emails all you have to do is insert the invoices and the relevant information and send it off. Standard is first a reminder a
week after the due date, two weeks later a stern demand and another two weeks later a final notice. Once you send that last one, be prepared
for annoyed emails and phone calls, or, when dealing with a larger clients, an email forwarded to a person higher up in the organization who will
ask you for an explanation. That doesn’t have to mean they will pay immediately, by the way, but you sure got their attention. The second
reason this is important is simple: should it come to the stage that you are handing off further collection to a debt collector, they need as much
ammunition as they can get. If you can show you have followed a procedure and that you are not landing them with an impossible assignment,
they will be much more effective in getting your cash. I have, based on my personal experience as a collection agent, perhaps more knowledge
than most translators but this stage of collection requires a certain experience that not everybody has, so stick to what you do best and let a
collection agency do what they do best.

4. avoid third party billing where you can

Sometimes a client can ask to send the invoice to a third party, for example when you are approached by an external consultant for a client. My
standard reply is to ask for a purchase order or email comfirmation of that third party before agreeing to it. It often causes problems once one
starts collecting the payment you are entitled to. That is not to say that this is a proven method of delaying payment, but better safe than sorry:
at least ask if there is another way instead and only agree to what is comfortable for you.

I have a fairly simple vision on collecting my money: it’s mine and I wants it. In that respect I am pretty much as evil as Gollem with his Ring.
Clients who persist in continuously delaying their payments may find I rarely have time for their assignments and if they ask why, I honestly say
that I prefer to accept assignments from other clients with a shorter payment delay. If they don’t like to hear that, that is not my problem. I
occasionally start demanding upfront payments when I find that a client is always late.

A client who insists that their client must pay first (unfortunately, the amount of translation agencies doing so seems on the rise) is in fact
shifting their business risk to you. The only business risk one must take is the risk of one’s own invoices. The inability of any client to make
proper payment arrangements with their end client should not end up on your plate. If that happens you are perfectly entitled to point that out.
Once a discussion has reached that stage, the relation with that client is probably already damaged enough to consider holding off any further
assignments from that client (it would be for me, unless I really like the work), at least until a good number of the outstanding invoices are paid
in full.

Being at the end of the chain means it can be yanked pretty much without serious consequences for the people yanking it and it displeases me
to no end every time it happens, as it would probably displease anybody. If you ever run into such a situation: keep it professional, thank people
for dealing with the situation and get the best possible result you can. And look for other clients if you haven’t already found them. The lack of
other clients should be no reason to accept exceptionally unfair practices, nor should it be a reason to go hungry. Often such delay tactics are
presented with the question to see it from their perspective. Be that as it may, they should also see it from your perspective: after all, you didn’t
set up shop to satisfy their financial appetites but yours…