Freelancer Must: Record-keeping

I've written that getting paid on time can be one of the biggest problems of freelancing. The longer I'm freelancing, the more I'm learning that there's a problem more basic than getting paid on time: getting paid at all.

As a freelancer, you get the freedom to be your own boss; as a freelancer, you get the annoying responsibilities that go along with being your own boss. One of the biggest responsibilities is tracking whether you've been paid--and whether you've been paid enough.

Lots of complications of the writing process can make tracking payment harder than you'd expect. Many publications don't provide invoices for payments; those that do often provide vague invoices that don't clearly lay out which articles the payments are for. This can be tricky if you've written lots of articles for a single magazine. Add to this the fact that payment is often delayed until the next pay day after publication--and the fact that articles are sometimes shelved and published later than originally planned--and tracking becomes a big hassle.

As if things couldn't get more complicated, bank records often don't include names of the money sender, so you may have to rely on dates on numbers to figure out where the payments are from. Finally, exact per-word figures can be different from the word counts on articles that you send in, since editors sometimes calculate from the words printed rather than words sent in.

Therefore, I've discovered a simple solution:

Start keeping a Word document where you make a note every time you send in a final draft to an editor, recording:


-The date sent and approximate date to be published
-Number of words
-Subject matter and publication name


As I've discovered, the more I write, the more I'm responsible to track, meaning Jay-Z was right: mo' money, mo' problems.