New Payment Process
Just read the new payment process schedule blog which I have to say is interesting - not really fair if your term of work is not a high fee or continual. Being in the Top200 freelancers and bill on average £1,500 to £2,300 p/m I see very few will benefit from the 3 days period. Likewise, I can't believe that fraudulent checks and timescales depend on the amount you earn 2 months prior. This is good clarity from PPH (and good it includes weekends) and I guess why the commission is reduced is ok but when it is back to 20% in January for everyone as I assume it will, surely everyone should be treated the same. After all, if you are paying the same fees surely the service received should be the same?
The length of your clearing period will be determined by how much you have earned on PeoplePerHour in the previous two calendar months.
Express clearing: 3 days - £6000 p/m
Fast clearing: 7 days - £2000 p/m
Standard clearing: 14 days - Less £2000 p/m
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Only just discovered this while trying to request a withdrawal after my client settled and the withdrawal option was not available. This is not a good move PPH - I reckon it will drive a lot of freelancers to other platforms.
14 days Standard clearing is a long time and this is 2021 - companies like Wise are making international transfers at lightning speed and here we are now suddenly having to deal with 14 days clearing? *sigh* very disappointed, to say the least.
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I can't understand the logic of this, although it is always confusing when every time PPH make a policy change they insist it is an "improvement". Let's assume I take on a new project worth £100, although these are getting very thin on the ground at the moment. I would ask for all of that to be put in Escrow before I started work. Then I would complete the job and once it was agreed with the client I would raise the invoice and the client would have 7 days to approve the transfer of money from Escrow to my account. At that point I can withdraw it. Sometimes I will delay withdrawing money if it is a small amount and I'm expecting more in the near future, but with £100 or more I would probably just take it. Now PPH would want 14 days for security checks to prevent fraud. What exactly does that mean? (Actually, we know what it means. They have probably found a bank that will give them 0.5% interest and they want to sit on the money as long as possible). Is the buyer a fraud? If so, it is a bit late telling me after I have done the work, delivered it and been paid. Am I a fraud? The money is paid into my company bank account, which I have been using through PPH for 5 or 6 years so what are they going to check in the next 14 days that they have not already checked? I don't know what other possibilities there could be.
In reality it makes little difference to me, except it makes the administration more difficult. If I was dealing with someone directly they might have 30 day payment terms and a lot of people don't even stick to that. PPH have always insisted that the money in Escrow is there for us once we have completed the work, but now they have broken that agreement. -
The fact that they have changed the rules once again in another month- I am now 100% convinced that they are in financial troubles and they are doing whatever they can to delay paying freelancers because they have spent the money paying themselves and they are currently robbing Peter to pay Paul, there is no other reasonable explanation, they don't openly declare these changes via any channel other than that blog when something like this should be a major announcement. Well for me that's it, I am no longer using this platform, it is a HUGE waste of time and effort to wait 2+ weeks for the sake of £20.
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@Mitch That crossed my mind as well. If I had to bet on it I would still say it was small minded greed allowing them to get a tiny amount of extra interest, rather than cash flow problems. There are a couple of changes that they have made in recent years that allow them to make money without any work being done. One was to keep money if a freelancer didn't withdraw it in a certain length of time. The other is to charge new freelancers to register. The business model that works for us is for PPH to get good quality work in, we do it and we pay them commission. If they find it is better just to charge freelancers to register or to steal the money from freelancers who have done one or two small crappy jobs and they haven't got round to taking it out, we become irrelevant.
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Very bad decision, speed is the game, everyone is going forward and quicker, PPH is in backword direction, mark my words, We all will see in 2-3 months that most developers/programmers/copywriters will switch to other platforms. It's understandable that building a new profile on a new freelancing website is not that hard for programmers and copywriters.
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