Artist's Resource Pack

If you work for an organisation, money coming in is easy – you get a wage, either weekly or monthly, and most people have this paid straight into their bank account. If you work for yourself, getting money coming in can be less straight forward. Here is some information and advice on:

How much should you charge?
Sending invoices
Chasing payment

How much should you charge?

If you are self employed, one of the hardest things to do is to decide how much to charge for your work.

Some people have an hourly rate, others have a rate per day. Some people change their rates depending on the work that they are doing – training, working as a artist, doing administration work. Some freelancers are paid a set rate for a contract – for example, actors are often paid at the Equity Minimum touring rate, if they are in a touring production.

There is a useful factsheet produced by CIDA on costing and pricing your services. This link will take you out of the artist’s resource site and to the CIDA site at the page where you can download the factsheet. (www.cida.co.uk/pages/resources/factsheets_70.shtml)

The Arts Council also have an information sheet on how to pay artists which gives some information about how to set rates. This link will take you out of the artist’s resource site and to the Arts Council England site at the page where you can download the information sheet. (www.artscouncil.org.uk/publications).

Your income may not come from rates, it might come from sales of your work. It can also be hard to price your work!

There is a useful article on pricing visual art works on the American site Art Business. This link will take you out of the artist’s resource site and to the Art Business site at the article (www.artbusiness.com/pricerealistic.html).

 
Sending invoices

If you do a piece of work for someone, to get your money you will need to send them an invoice. This is a simple written document detailing what you did and how much they owe you. Some organisations pay up front (before you have done the work), but most pay in arrears (when you have finished). For large pieces of work, you can often choose how to be paid – some up front, some at the end of the work and maybe some in the middle if it’s a large project.

An invoice has to have some key information on it:
The invoice date (not the date of the work, but the date on which you are sending the invoice)
An invoice number (each invoice you send should have a different number on it)
Your name and address
Information about what you are being paid for 
The total amount of money they owe you

You can add extra information – how quickly you expect the money to come through to you, for example. Most people give 28 days as large organisations have to put all payments through their systems before you can have your money.

If you are VAT registered you have to include your VAT number on invoices and also show clearly which items have VAT added to them and which don’t (for example, you cannot claim VAT on your travel costs because you do not pay VAT on travel).

Chasing payment

You don’t have to feel embarrassed about invoicing people or reminding them to pay you as once you have delivered the work, the money is yours!

If people often pay you late and this is a problem for you, you can try adding more information to your invoices. You could charge interest on late payments, adding more money to your invoice for each week they are late, or your could put an administration charge for each reminder you send them about being late (like banks do if you are overdrawn). This kind of information needs to be on the first invoice you send out to be legal, you cannot add it on after you have sent the original out.

There are lots of techniques you can use for getting payment. Try these:
Emailing or calling the person you have direct contact with in the organisation that owes you and ask them to chase it.
Try a little emotional pressure – tell them you can’t afford to go shopping, are about to go overdrawn, need to book your next holiday
Try sending a formal reminder letter and don’t do any more work for them until they do pay for what you have already done.
If your invoice has information about interest and an administration charge written on it, produce a new invoice for the higher amount and send them that.

The final thing you can try is to take them through the small claims court – even just threatening this can sometimes achieve results.

To find out more, follow this link. This will take you out of the artists’ resource site and to Her Majesty’s Courts Service’s site at the page for making a claim (www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/infoabout/claims/index.htm).

Don’t accept not being paid for work unless there is genuine reason that you are happy with, like you didn’t do all the work or you know your work was of a poor quality.