Freelance Invoicing: How Big Should Your Deposit Be?

The pain: you do three weeks of work, deliver it, invoice it… and then wait, exposed, while the entire project fee rides on one payment from a client you may barely know. If it's late — or never comes — you worked for free. That's not a billing problem; it's a risk problem.

The fix: deposit up front, balance on delivery

Take 25–50% before you start — on every project over a few hundred dollars, and on every new client. A deposit funds your work in progress, filters out the clients who were never going to pay promptly, and turns the final invoice from "the whole bill" into "the last installment."

The clean way to do it is a payment schedule on the invoice itself: deposit and balance shown as separate installments, each payable online by card, each ticking itself off as it's paid. That's built into The Invoicer App — along with the two-minute invoices and automatic tracking that keep your admin tiny.