Before diving into a project, ensure everyone's on the same page. Upwork's Talent Standards emphasize the importance of setting clear expectations upfront. Here are some tips to help you achieve this:
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Client communication: Consider initiating a conversation with the client to discuss the project details. Ask clarifying questions to grasp their needs and vision fully.
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Scope of work: You and your client will want to define the project scope in detail, including outlining the key requirements, deliverables, milestones, and any revisions included in the agreed-upon price.
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Budget and payment terms: You and your client will want to discuss budget expectations and agree on a payment schedule. Upwork offers various payment protection options—ensure you understand and choose the method that best suits your needs. You can find more information on payment methods at Upwork's Get Paid support page.
Upwork allows you to withdraw funds manually or set up an automatic payment schedule. If you want to withdraw your funds, you can do so at any time by using the Get Paid Now option. Enter the amount you would like to withdraw, click the get paid button. Setting up an automatic payment schedule is a great option to make getting paid more convenient. You can choose one of these options weekly. We'll send your available funds to you every Wednesday, twice per month. Your payment is sent on the first and third Wednesday of each month. Monthly payment occurs on the last Wednesday of each month or quarterly. Your funds are paid out on the last Monday of each quarter.
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Deadlines and milestones: Service contracts should establish clear deadlines for project completion and ensure alignment between you and your client on any key milestones along the way. This will help you both track progress and ensure timely delivery.
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Communication preferences: Discuss communication preferences with the client, so you can agree on preferred methods (e.g., email, chat) and expected response times to help you maintain clear and consistent communication throughout the project.
Solidify agreements
Upwork provides resources to solidify these agreements within the platform:
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Contracts: Service contracts on Upwork are legally binding agreements between you and your client. Ensure the contract reflects the agreed-upon scope, budget, deadlines, and communication protocols.
Upwork has four types of payment, hourly fixed price, project catalog, and bonuses. Hourly contracts provide payments on a weekly billing cycle, which ends each week on Sunday. If you have an hourly contract, your funds will be available for withdrawal 10 days later. Fixed price contracts may consist of one or more milestones. Payment occurs when you complete a milestone and the client approves it. You can withdraw payment after a five day security period. Project catalog contracts also require the client's approval for the project. Once the client approves your project, your funds are available after a five day security period. Bonus payments are available to you after your client's payment is successfully processed and the five day security period has passed.
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Work Diary: Upwork's Work Diary allows you to track your time spent on an hourly project and submit timesheets for your client's approval. This helps foster transparency and accurate billing based on agreed-upon hourly rates. Make sure the hours you document are accurate, relevant to the project, and reflect work for the correct client.
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You must have permission from your client to add time manually. The client can either set up the contract so that manual time is allowed and enabled from the beginning, or you can request permission on a case-by-case basis.
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Let's learn how to use the work diary. So first we need to find the work diary and then going to the actual work diary. This will bring up a page that shows your work diary. If you have more clients, it will let you kind of look through each contract and bring up every hour segment that you have for each one. Now if you want to look at your work diary where it's more specific to a contract you can go to to log track time into your work diary. You do need to download the upward desktop app. Once you have downloaded the app and opened it, you'll choose a contract, toggle the trackers on and off, switch to on and enter a memo and or activity. Let's look around this time sheet. So for hours that you've actually tracked through the upper app, they will be in green. And you see here that it keeps a tally of your tracked hours. For this freelancer, they have logged manual hours. So manual hours like tracked hours are billable to your client and they are hours that you put in yourself instead of them being tracked. A tip here is I would make sure that this was okay with your client before adding manual time. For our red, this is when you are over your limit. So this will be for any time over the weekly limit agreed with your client and it is not billable. Tracked in manual is billable to your client. Over your limit is not billable. So if you would like to edit your memo, you can do this by clicking the particular memo bar. You'll see a window pop up and you can click the more details button and select edit group. From there, you can edit your memo. So I'm going to erase looking at files. I'm going to add instead adding screenshots to doc and then we'll save it. Now that has been updated. It may come a time where you need to update your work diary. You're able to add, edit, and delete time on an active contract in the current week's work diary. So the key word there is it needs to be the current week, the previous week's work diary is no longer able to be edited after Monday at noon UTC. Just some specifics here. Only the freelancer can add, delete or edit time in their work Diary. Your client can edit your activity labels but not your memos or anything else. Every hourly contract that you have has its own work diary. As you saw when we went into the work diary link in the top menu, you were able to go through each hourly contract, uh, to see what your hours were for each one. Only time within the weekly limit on an hourly contract willbe billed and included in reports and Upwork uses 10 minute billing segments. Therefore, some rounding will occur. Let me show you the 10 minute billing segments. So for example, if our fill answer wanted to add more manual time, if I open up this start time, you notice that it, it goes from 3, 3 10, 3 20, 3 30, And then the end time is the same way. You can also choose the time zone. You can choose from UTC or mine. And one crucial thing is the work diary on a closed contract cannot be edited. That's a huge thing that you need to remember.
Follow these steps and leverage Upwork's resources to set clear expectations with your client, prevent misunderstandings, and experience a smooth, successful project for everyone involved.
