> ...to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years missed completely.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're doing something very wrong if you've lost track of $100,000s of payments.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're doing something very wrong if you've lost track of $100,000s of payments.
In the early years, aggregating staff time sheets was manual and easy to put off. We ended up building https://usepunch.com to handle that which is a massive help.
In web development and with 100+ clients, it can be quite difficult to track things like hosting and domains when they're spread across multiple providers, renewing at different times of the year, etc. We ended up building an internal web-app that interfaces with Xero to help manage this, but this was 18+ years in...
And yeah, I can appreciate I've done something very wrong. I've found that all too easy when spread so thin.
After that I phoned after every invoice - which was a pain in the ass for me and for AP, but the money (mostly) arrived on time.
It's really, really easy to miss how important admin and cashflow are. They're boring AF, but also too important to ignore.
Even worse is the realisation that sometimes you are going to be paid late, sometimes you are going to be offered partial payment, and sometimes you may never be paid at all - and these are all absolutely normal in business and you should expect them and have contingencies for them.
As a rule, any freelance work where you rely on timely payment from a single client to cover your outgoings is incredibly risky and dangerous and can easily become very stressful - because you are literally flirting with financial death.
It's great that you could do it.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do it OK, I'm saying it's easy to get it wrong and fall behind. I mentioned the idea of an opinionated business framework to a friend (freelancing very occasionally 1-2 years) and they said "Oh YES, absolutely." And that's for someone who'd send 2-3 invoices a month, not 50+.