Constructive criticism for large companies who hire contractors:
Be upfront about how you want to be invoiced.
Have a plan about how you’d like to be invoiced. Once a month? Twice a month? Once every two weeks? I’m not saying that you can’t be flexible, or have grey areas, or decide to change your mind levels of okay-ness with not being invoiced in the way that you define, but having some sort of baseline that you advertise is a good place to start.
If possible, automate.
Think about implementing a system with limited automated capabilities. Think web-based forms instead of Word or PDF based invoices. Think about standardization. Think about batch processing. Time will be saved on everybody’s part. Less time to prepare invoices. Clean approval pipelines. Finally, if a schedule exists, your contractor can have some assurances as to when checks will be cut, etc.
Be up front about status.
Finally, if neither of the two is in place in any regard and someone inquires about status… Be prompt and set expectations appropriately. Nothing sucks worse than wanting to find out the status of your livelihood and feeling like it goes into a black hole.
If you happen to be a contractor, use your mad skills to suss this information out of your employer.
In short: set clear expectations, under-promise, over-communicate and over-deliver.
