Particularly when your workload is high and you find yourself dancing from one job to another, things like billing and chasing payments can seem less important than meeting deadlines. But remember that you are in business and the only way you get paid is through your invoicing. Here are two things you can do to help you stay on top of your billing.

Make sure you have a clear list of who owes you what and how long they have left to pay.

This can be a simple spreadsheet of invoice numbers, job titles, amounts and due dates. Alternately you can have a couple of folders on your desktop and label them as “Outstanding”, “Overdue” and “Paid” then just move your invoices from folder to folder so you can quickly see which ones need action.

Set aside a day for chasing invoices.

Its a good idea to have a ‘billing day’ where you set aside a few hours to call clients who are overdue, email clients to remind them about outstanding invoices and to send out new ones. Having this happen on the same day every week also ensures that it you don’t need to express any emotions or feel embarassed to be raising the issue of money, it is simply your ‘billing day’.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Design, Design Careers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.