The Invoice Mistakes That Cost Freelancers Thousands

In my second year of freelancing I had a client who owed me $4,200 for a completed project. The work was delivered, they were happy with it, and the invoice was sent the day after final delivery. Six weeks later I still had not been paid. When I followed up, their accounts payable team told me the invoice was missing a purchase order number, so it had been sitting in a queue waiting for someone to manually route it. Four thousand dollars delayed six weeks because of one missing field. That was the most expensive lesson I ever learned about invoicing. Since then I have talked to hundreds of freelancers and the mistakes repeat themselves with alarming consistency. Most of them are avoidable and most of them cost real money. Vague line items invite disputes The most common mistake I see is a single line item that reads something like "Web development services" followed by a dollar amount. This tells the client nothing about what was actually delivered, and it creates an opening for disput