About

One chain, written about in pieces

A freelancer's money problems arrive as one continuous chain — a clause you agreed to, a scope that grew, an invoice with terms nobody read, a client who stopped replying, and a statute that may or may not apply to you. The writing about that chain is split into pieces that never touch, and the questions that fall between the pieces are the ones that actually cost money:

• The master services agreement says payment is due "within sixty days of Client's approval of the invoice," and approval never comes. My invoice says net 30. Which document controls, and what do I do about it now that both are signed?
• A client in Chicago owes me $2,800 for work delivered in March. Illinois requires payment within thirty days and doubles the underpayment. Do I file with the state labour department, sue in small claims, or both — and does it change anything that we never signed a contract at all?
• Their MSA has an uncapped indemnity and a work-made-for-hire clause that reaches every "work created during the Term." I want the job. What do I ask to strike when I have no leverage, and what am I actually giving away if I sign it as written?

Search those and you land in one of two piles that do not know about each other. The first is template content published by invoicing and contract software — universal, jurisdiction-free, and written to end at a signup button, so it can tell you what net 30 means but not which of your two documents wins. The second is law-firm client alerts about the new freelancer statutes, and those are genuinely useful except for one detail: they are addressed to the companies doing the hiring. They explain the compliance exposure of the party on the other side of your invoice. Reading them as the freelancer is like reading somebody else's mail and trying to work out your own position from it.

Nothing joins the two. The clause you signed and the statute that would pay you double for the same non-payment are treated as separate subjects by everyone writing about them.

So this site follows the chain in order — clause, scope, invoice terms, collections ladder, statute — and treats the last link as part of the same subject as the first. Illinois's Freelance Worker Protection Act, New York's statewide Freelance Isn't Free Act, and the city ordinances in Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Columbus are public documents. Almost nobody has written them up for the person they were passed to protect. That is the job here.

Not a law firm, and not a software review

It is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. It can tell you where the payment clause sits in a contract, what the questions about it are, and what your state's statute says on its face. It cannot tell you what your agreement means, whether you have a claim, or what will happen if you file. For that you need someone licensed where you are, and several pages here end by saying so.

It is not a review site for invoicing tools, contract generators, or collections services, and it carries no affiliate links to any of them. There is no "best invoicing app" page and there will not be one: a site with something to sell you loses the ability to say what that something will not fix, and what software will not fix is most of this subject.

It is not tax or accounting advice. W-9s and 1099s appear here as paperwork that has to be filed before a client's system will pay you, never as guidance on how anything should be reported.

It is not about employment claims. Everything here assumes you are engaged as an independent contractor. Worker classification is covered only in the form it shows up in your contract, because misclassification disputes are a different body of law and a different kind of help.

Forty rows in a spreadsheet

I am Delia Marsh. For twelve years I have taken freelance work in copywriting and video production, and for most of those years I kept a spreadsheet of invoices that had gone past due — what the contract said, what I sent, what I said next, how long it took, and whether I ever saw the money. It ran to roughly forty rows. About a dozen of them ended in something more formal than an email, and a few ended in a courtroom small enough to have a queue in the hallway.

That spreadsheet is why the site is organised the way it is. Reading it back, almost every entry traced to a decision made months earlier — an acceptance clause with no deadline, an undated scope, a "sure, no problem" I never turned into a change order. The collections part of this site exists because clients go quiet. The contracts part exists because the collections part is mostly determined before the work starts.

I am not a lawyer, I have no legal qualification, and I do not practise law. What I have is twelve years of being the small party in other people's paperwork, and a habit of going to the statute itself rather than to a summary of it.

Source text, effective dates, ninety-day re-checks

Anything on this site that states a legal rule is read in the source text — the Illinois Compiled Statutes, Article 44-A of New York's General Business Law, the municipal code for a city ordinance — and linked to that text, not to an article about it. Agency material comes from the agency: the Illinois Department of Labor, the New York State Department of Labor, and the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection all publish their own complaint procedures and forms, and those are what get linked.

Every page in the statute categories carries three things in the open: the effective date of the rule, the agency that enforces it, and a line reading "Checked against <agency> on <date>." This area of law is four years old and still moving — a state passes a version, a city already had one, thresholds differ, and a page written without a date goes wrong quietly. Those pages are re-checked on a ninety-day cycle and re-stamped whether or not anything changed; the rest of the site runs on six months.

Where a rule depends on where you or the client are, the page names the jurisdiction instead of generalising. Where the statute is silent or untested, the page says so rather than filling the gap with a guess. And where I am describing what I did rather than what a rule requires — a demand letter that worked, a payment structure I now insist on — it is marked as exactly that.

Disagree with something on a page?

This body of law is four years old and still being amended, so a page can be right in March and wrong by autumn. Two things are worth sending above all others: an effective date or a dollar threshold that has moved since a page was stamped, and a first-hand account from anyone who has just filed with a labour department or sat through a small claims hearing — that part is in no statute text. File it with me and the page gets read against the source again, amended, and re-stamped with the date of the change.