Sarah Miller’s previous work for The Toast, for which she has been paid by Nikki in a timely fashion, can be found here.
From: [email protected]
Hi Evan,
I did two stories in January (to refresh your memory one was an analysis of Beyoncé’s last 100 photographed outfits, “100 Times Beyoncé was Perfect,” each with its own animated gif, and original reporting from stylists, fashion designers, and, where appropriate, music industry sources, and the second one, “What’s the Best State to Change your Gender?” was a quiz, accompanied by a clickable U.S. map which provided a state-by-state round up of relevant legislation and short, reported interviews with local activists).
Total payment is $175 – $75 each, and my editor threw in an extra $25 for the 50 short interviews. Please advise.
Best,
Sarah
*
From: [email protected]
Hi Evan.
This is Sarah Miller again. I wrote you last Monday. I did two stories for the January issue, “100 Times Beyoncé was Perfect,” and “What’s the Best State to Change your Gender?” and I haven’t gotten paid yet. Just checking in!
Sarah
*
From: [email protected]
Hi Sarah.
Sorry, I didn’t get back to you. I have been looking into it, for a week.
Who did you do that story for?
Evan
*
From: [email protected]
Evan,
I did it for Julie Craven. Here is one link and here is the other one.
Sarah
*
From: [email protected]
Julie is at Buzzfeed now. Did you send her an invoice?
Evan
*
From: [email protected]
Evan,
Yes, I did. Here is a copy of it, along with my tax forms again.
Sarah
*
From: [email protected]
Sorry, what’s this about?
Evan
*
From: [email protected]
FWD: To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Hi Evan,
I did two stories in January (to refresh your memory one was an analysis of Beyoncé’s last 100 photographed outfits, “100 Times Beyoncé was Perfect,” each with its own animated gif, and original reporting from stylists, fashion designers, and, where appropriate, music industry sources, and the second one, “What’s the Best State to Change your Gender?” was a quiz, accompanied by a clickable U.S. map which provided a state-by-state round up of relevant legislation and short, reported interviews with local activists).
Total payment is $175 – $75 each, and my editor threw in an extra $25 for the 50 short interviews. Please advise.
Best,
Sarah
*
From: [email protected]
I had to look these stories up and it took me few weeks to do that. Apologies, but it would help if you would please include this reference number: 8234jep333wwwwwoopp22 in all your correspondence.
Thanks.
Evan
*
From: [email protected]
Reference number: 8234jep333wwwwwoopp22
Attached is my invoice.
If you could please send payment as soon as possible, as this is long overdue.
Thanks.
Sarah
*
From: [email protected]
CC: carriemartinmusgrove@website.
Reference number: 8234jep333wwwwwoopp22
Carrie: Please help Sarah signed up for the Supplier Network. Sarah: you need to fax a photo I.D. to [email protected], and then you also need to fill out this direct deposit paperwork. Fax that to the same number.
*
CC: carriemartinmusgrove@website.
From: [email protected]
Hi Evan. Hi Carrie.
This is Sarah Miller. My reference number is 8234jep333wwwwwoopp22. I have signed up in the Supplier Network, which, I must add, took me several hours, and, in the end, required me to hire a consultant. I faxed both the photo I.D. and the direct deposit forms. You have my invoice. I think that’s all. Can you let me know when I can expect payment?
Sarah
*
From: evansackler-mayberry@website.
Hi Sarah
We generally pay 110 business days after we process the invoice. Because you were late with your paperwork and we can only submit invoices to accounts receivable on the last Friday of every quarter, I am not entirely clear on when we will be able to submit yours. But I am going to leave it to Carrie to give you an official answer.
*
From: [email protected]
Hi Carrie. I was wondering when I/8234jep333wwwwwoopp22 could expect payment on this invoice.
*
From: [email protected]
Hi Sarah.
Could you please put the invoice number on any inquiries about payment?
Carrie
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
*
From: [email protected]
This is Invoice #1. My reference number is 8234jep333wwwwwoopp22. I have put everything in the Supplier Network, etc. I was wondering when I might expect payment.
*
AUTOMATIC REPLY FROM [email protected]
I am currently on maternity leave. Please direct all inquiries to [email protected]
Carrie
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
Tags: horror, humor, money, sarah miller, WE DON’T DO INVOICES ANYMORE PLEASE FORGIVE US OUR SINS, writing
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Oof. That is…instructive.
I GOT SO USED TO THE LUXURY OF THE NO INVOICE TOAST EXPERIENCE THAT WHEN I DID SOMETHING FOR THE LIBERTY PROJECT I COMPLETELY FORGOT TO INVOICE THEM
IT WAS SO EMBARASSING
IN CONCLUSON EVERYONE DO WHAT THE TOAST DOES RIGHT NOW.
In contrast:
Me: Hey, Nicole, I haven’t gotten paid yet, but it’s only been a month. What’s The Toast’s payment schedule?
Nicole: OH MY GOD NICK PLEASE PAY THIS PERSON!!!!
Nick, approximately 23 seconds later: ACK WHAT IS YOUR PAYPAL ACCOUNT ACK!
Me: *gives PayPal info*
PayPal, approximately 2 minutes later: You have a payment!
Me: Whoa.
(I think Nicole was on maternity leave then, too.)
Cliffe was on maternity leave, you emailed me. Rejoice, for I am no longer the go-between. We pay the week’s writers every Friday, and most of the time I even remember not to pay them from my PERSONAL PayPal, and things are much brighter.
This piece brought back oh, so many memories of [publication redacted]. I’m in a permanent state of cringe.
See, you guys are so efficient that I can’t even remember who fixed the problem!
“It was one of the Nicoles, probably?”
*flops over*
Just got my Toast check in the mail for my Metal Middle-earth piece and am feeling deeply grateful, yet again, for the nigh-miraculous speed with which the Toast’s various and sundry Nicoles respond to their writers.
Hah. Because I’m fortunate enough to do my occasional blogging as a side project, I would always forget to send in invoices and end up sending in like six months’ at once. The site (Tor.com) eventually did away with invoices, too, which I imagine involved way less cat-wrangling and way more certainty for them.
ideally, a real company has a system where they both track what they have purchased and pay it promptly (for people who supply, like, office paper and machine parts, you usually have terms agreed on that include a prompt payment discount) and expect invoices so they can match them to their own purchases and make sure nothing hinky is going on.
It’s bizarre how terrible business practices can be standard in an industry. Just because your providers are freelancers doesn’t mean you have a free pass on being terrible at managing your business.
I still have about 4 invoices-I-should-really-send-out dating back to last December. The longer I wait the more cringeworthy it becomes to think about them.
The thing is: the free-lancing is a side thing for me, and I have a job which just pays me a salary ever month. Hence: it’s not in my routine, and I feel insecure about doing it right, and I don’t really need the money that urgently so it just keeps getting postponed.
I feel a ball of anxiety in my stomach just typing this. Maybe I should do it this weekend.
Go go invoicing go! You can do it! Tiny ASCII cheerleaders say so! *\o/* *\o/* *\o/*
As someone on the other side of this, you need to submit these ASAP. You don’t know when they close their financial books for the year/for specific projects/etc. It can come to a point where they literally are no longer able to pay you. I’d also raise an eyebrow if I was receiving an invoice for a job done 8 months ago.
My heartfelt apologies, as always, for how shitty and restrictive our contracts used to be, and what a hassle it was to get paid. We really try to do a better job now, and our writers are everything to us.
It was still about a bazillion times better than almost anything I experienced anywhere else.
That is depressing as BALLS, but thank you.
Even in the old days, I got paid quickly except for one time I fell between the cracks, which (as someone upthread remarks), Nick fixed with a lavish apology and an electronic transfer literally a few minutes after you put me in touch with him. It was like magic.
THE FREELANCE EMAILS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE MY HOUSE.
OMG, I can’t stop laughing because I have been through this so many times. You really nailed it!
This is exactly true, down to multiple people you are working with changing jobs or vanishing. Terror flashbacks to Large And Very Established Media Organization That Should Know Better And Also Who Quoted Rates In One Currency And Then Paid In Lesser Currency And Ignored All Emails Regarding The Discrepancy.
Also having horror palpitations at the realness of “$75 each, and my editor threw in an extra $25 for the 50 short interviews.”
Relevant.
I don’t think I’ve ever had such an article hit so close to home about my job. I’ve spent most of 2015 trying to find out my purchasing order numbers, trying to decipher emails from outsourced workers about setting up a supplier account, initialing and scanning ridiculously long contracts, and generally chasing down editors and accounts payable people to find out why I haven’t been paid for months. If I didn’t have a wife who’d spot me some rent money, I’d be fucked. Now excuse me while I go find my passport to scan for another invoicing system.
This just reminded me to count how many weeks it had been since my first paid freelance piece went up, which I haven’t received a check for yet. It’s been seven weeks. I was told it could take around eight weeks. I just put it on my calendar to email my editor if I don’t get a check by next week, ugh.
I’m not a freelance writer, but I can relate to this! Once, after not hearing from my client for a month, I e-mailed them about my payment, and it turned out they just…forgot about the project. Oh, but since I had reminded them, they noticed some background noise on my recording, so could I please do the recording a second time? And then there was another guy who just never responded to my e-mails after I sent him the mp3 files. Being a newb to voice acting, I wasn’t sure what I could do, especially since the client lived on another continent. In short, clients can be such jerks. 🙁
So so painful, hurting my eyeballs and my soul at once. Worst was having to set myself up as a vendor for the State of California to get paid virtually nothing from a publication at UC Berkeley. Would rather set myself on fire than repeat.
This e-mail is literally why everyone at The Toast deserves approximately 10,956 gold stars and 58 beers on me. It’s probably the only publication that has ever paid me on time and didn’t make me send them e-mails like “OKAY NOW HI IT’S BEEN AROUND 52 DAYS SINCE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PAID AND I COULD REALLY USE THAT MONEY BECAUSE THE ONLY THINGS I HAVE IN THE FRIDGE ARE A STICK OF MARGARINE AND SRIRACHA.”
Feeling grateful, though, for being paid money you’re owed, money you’ve EARNED, also seems unfortunate. :/
Totally true, it’s incredibly unfortunate. And it’s also a huge indicator of the absurd dissonance between how much writers are needed and how much writers are actually valued.
I was once working on the other side of these transactions in Large Company That Shall Remain Nameless. In other words, I would get emails from accounting asking me to set up suppliers and freelancers in our payment system. I would open accounts according to provided name, address, net payment terms, etc. and send the account number to accounting. Every day, 40-50 accounts minimum. Some days I would add a few hundred of these accounts.
Problem 1: The system could not process address changes. To change a freelancer’s address, I have to create an entirely new account and *merge* the old account to the new one. Regularly, the system would crash doing so and everything was irreversible no matter the outcome.
Problem 2: I was not part of the accounting department, but the purchasing department. I was also doubling as a secretary for said purchasing department. This meant that I got caught in the middle whenever purchasing got in fights with accounting, which was pretty much always.
Problem 3: I didn’t have the authorization to open an account if there was no purchase order. It didn’t matter if you had a contract with our company, you had to have a purchase order for me to even be allowed to open one of these accounts. This means I couldn’t set up people in advance. The irony was that I was also the one adding contracts to our database, so I knew exactly who was supposed to get paid later.
Problem 4: Purchase orders were a serious pain to get or set up. You needed to:
– get it approved through the budget
– get up to 5 signatures from upper management
– prove you had the signed contract
– get the ledger account number from accounting for that specific supplier
– get purchasing (other people, not me) to set up *that* account in the system – and purchasing regularly made mistakes here because there was no manual explaining how this system worked and it involved 8 or 9 different screens. Plus that system was buggy too.
– get the purchase order approved *again* by a whole different set of managers
– finally, send it to the supplier or freelancer
Purchasing explicitly refused to fix or document their purchase order system. And then blamed accounting for it. Accounting believed that everyone in the company should automatically know obscure accounting ledger numbers. Accounting also had most of their bills in paper forms, stacked boxes high in archives, so any time anyone wanted to inquire about a bill, they sent a junior accounting clerk go pull out boxes from archives. In 2013.
Problem 5: Our boss wanted to change the system for the better and had good ideas, but was one of those people with multiple scattered plans at every given time. She was also in charge of a completely different department in another province and would fly there 4 days out of 5. Nice person, went into burnout a few months before I was dismissed.
Tl;dr – It’s just as bad on the company’s side of things.
Are you sure this company wasn’t actually a large research university? Because dear God does that sound familiar.
Also, all the sympathy (and empathy).
It does sound really really familiar…
This is also how my employer (a government agency) handles its finances/the taxpayers’ money.
OOH, on a parallel note, someone from my horsey community liked my equine drawings that I posted on FB, emailed me a picture of her two horses, ASKED for a commission based on aforementioned drawing, I did the drawing, forwarded the image to her with my rate (very, VERY reasonable), and then…….
she said “thanks!”, used my drawing as her new FB profile picture and ignored my plea for payment.
Like, fuck.
In a case like that, I’d be spamming copies of the correspondence and a screenshot of her FB profile all over the Internet. Burn with fire.
I’ve been freelancing for six years, mainly for small/medium cultural organizations, but also occasionally for large universities. Guess who the biggest deadbeats are? I’m looking at YOU, P——-n and C——a. (The names look so dirty typed like that!) Funny how non-profits, sometimes running on shoestring budgets, can manage to pay their bills on time, but Ivy League behemoths take months to cough up the paltry sums they owe people like me.
N-U was similarly terrible at paying people, because they just… didn’t feel the need to actually send the invoice to AP? I dunno. Terrible. Sending a breach of contract notice was kind of the best thing ever, though. Having an actual contract, though a source of much delay, was ultimately very helpful for me.
I love the added detail of the Mark Twain email signature
Um… I’m pretty sure that quote isn’t actually Mark Twain http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cindy-lovell/thats-…
Tag: “horror” has never been more accurate
The issue of timing aside–not that it’s insignificant–but I am whimpering with empathy over the amount of the payment. How few of us freelancers even blinked at that amount in this parody-but-not-really? Math was never my strength, but unless she wrote the 2 fab pieces in 3 hours total….The gifs! The activists! The time spent waiting for the stylists to return emails! Figuring out where Beyonce can best change her gender! Sigh.
Yeah, that was the first thing that hit me. $75 and you included a bunch of gifs, no less? $.50 per short interview? I want to cry.
I spent a lean season not long ago also writing short chunks of sales copy for $15 a pop, which (the friend who recruited me suggested) should take roughly an hour each, but which it turns out actually took me 1.5 to 2 hours each between research and writing, and even longer if they requested changes, WHICH THEY DID, and left me too wrung to do any other writing for an hour or two after…
… soooooo yeah, I didn’t even blink at that number.
I made that much per story when I was a freelancer.
30 years ago.
Shared! I’d like to frame this one. Absolutely classic story of chasing a payment. Would be funnier if it wasn’t so common…
Happens in the film television industry too… I’ve considered billing for the time it takes me to register with whatever in house nonsense they tell me I have to sign up for..
The fact that Mark Twain never said what’s in the signature quote of your correspondent is a nice touch.
I still have about 4 invoices-I-should-really-send-out dating back to last December. The longer I wait the more cringeworthy it becomes to think about them.
The thing is: the free-lancing is a side thing for me, and I have a job which just pays me a salary ever month. Hence: it's not in my routine, and I feel insecure about doing it right, and I don't really need the money that urgently so it just keeps getting postponed.
I feel a ball of anxiety in my stomach just typing this. Maybe I should do it this weekend.
This is almost not even funny. I loved it.
Even in the old days, I got paid quickly except for one time I fell between the cracks, which (as someone upthread remarks), Nick fixed with a lavish apology and an electronic transfer literally a few minutes after you put me in touch with him. It was like magic.
I spent a lean season not long ago also writing short chunks of sales copy for $15 a pop, which (the friend who recruited me suggested) should take roughly an hour each, but which it turns out actually took me 1.5 to 2 hours each between research and writing, and even longer if they requested changes, WHICH THEY DID, and left me too wrung to do any other writing for an hour or two after…
… soooooo yeah, I didn't even blink at that number.
I could not love this any more if I tried.
I could not love this any more if I tried.
OMG, I can’t stop laughing because I have been through this so many times. You really nailed it!
OMG, I can't stop laughing because I have been through this so many times. You really nailed it!
I laughed out loud – actually cackled – on the R train when I read the Mark Twain quote.
Two words: Spot. On.
UGHHH groaned all throughout this article, loudest at Carrie’s signature quote. 🙁
UGHHH groaned all throughout this article, loudest at Carrie's signature quote. 🙁
This is as satisfyingly enraging as Hey Ladies.
Sarah – this is horrific, please tell me that you got paid in the end!