Many freelancers shy away from charging for anything other than their services. It can be very intimidating to add a fee to an invoice. Freelancers think that they might lose a client for asking for more or that they’ll be labeled as difficult to work with.
Sometimes fees are more than justified, though. As a freelancer, you have very few workplace protections. Fees for things that negatively affect your money and business are appropriate and will help keep you afloat.
Here are 3 fees that all freelancers should feel comfortable implementing when they need to, plus we’ll disclose the perfect tool to help you create professional invoices in a matter of minutes, automate the process, and streamline your business.
Late Fees
At some point, a late payment will happen to every freelancer. It’s an unfortunate truth of the freelancing world. But just because a client pays late doesn’t mean you’re powerless.
Late fees are a great way to let clients know they need to pay on time in the future and for you to be somewhat compensated for their delay. Freelancers must follow their money from start to finish — from sending the pitch, to creating the invoice, to recording the payment.
When clients don’t pay on time, freelancers must do additional work to track down the money. A late fee is appropriate to compensate the freelancers for getting the money and a polite way to remind clients to pay on time in the future.
As you’ll learn at the end, the best tool for this is undoubtedly Bonsai — who’ll handle late fee payment reminders on your behalf, and more to save you the time and hassle of chasing each payment yourself.
Rush Fees
There’s a famous saying: a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. If a client needs a piece of work turned around quickly, freelancers can absolutely implement a rush fee.
Work that needs to be turned in with short notice can mess with your schedule, add work to your plate, and require more work and stress than usual.
All of this is something that you can and should charge for. There’s no overtime or back pay for freelancers unless we create it ourselves. A rush fee can help cover your time and energy costs for the output you’re giving.
Consulting Fees
People may start asking you for your advice when you start gaining some traction as a freelancer. Don’t get bogged down by requests to ‘pick your brain’ or ‘give some feedback’ if you don’t have the time or can’t afford it.
It’s wonderful to be kind, but if you genuinely can’t afford to give someone an hour of your time for free, you can implement a consulting fee. Consulting fees can take a variety of forms.
You can have an hourly rate or sell yourself as a consultant and create packages. If you create any sort of handout for the client, consider that as well.
Consulting fees are a great way to take back some of your time, continually earn money, and weed out people who simply want something for nothing.
Use Bonsai for Quick and Easy Invoicing and Accounting
Bonsai is a freelancer’s dream come true for invoicing and accounting. Here’s why over 500,000 freelancers and small business owners choose this tool to handle these parts of their business:
Invoicing Templates
For one, Bonsai gives you ample free customizable invoicing templates (with payment integrated to make it easy for clients to pay) to make getting started a breeze and simplify the process to ensure you get paid quicker.
Powerful Automation
It gets better, though. On top of this, Bonsai can also automatically fill invoices for you — simply review them and send them. Plus, you can forget chasing clients for payments or juggling who you’ve followed up with and who you haven’t.
Bonsai does this for you too. It’ll automatically send your clients payment reminders on your behalf to minimize late payments.
No Need for Integrations
On the whole, Bonsai is an all-in-one business tool that includes numerous tools to streamline your processes, improve your business relationships, and help you keep track of your financials, client projects and documents, and more with ease.
This means you don’t need to worry about paying for separate integrations to manage different parts of your business. With Bonsai, you can:
- Automate your accounting (i.e., expense tracking)
- Get assistance with your tax (i.e., automatic tax deductions)
- Create invoices, proposals, contracts, and more
- Manage and organize clients, projects, tasks, and documents
- Track the time spent on individual tasks and projects
- Automatically tag leads and know their position in your funnel
And more. Take advantage of the 14-day free trial today, and see why this tool is the go-to for so many freelancers. Interested to learn more? Read our in-depth review and comparison of the best accounting software solutions on the market.