Should You Invoice Before or After the Work?

After the work — the default, and why

For most freelance engagements, invoicing on delivery is the professional norm: the client can see what they are paying for, the invoice describes finished deliverables (which makes the descriptions easy to write well), and the due-date clock starts when value has changed hands. New freelancers sometimes invoice early out of anxiety; resist it — an invoice for unfinished work creates a document that matches nothing the client can verify.

Before the work — deposits, and when they are fair

• The project is long — a deposit (commonly a portion of the total) at booking, the balance on delivery, keeps both sides committed across weeks.
• You buy things for the job — materials, licences, stock: a deposit covering those costs means a cancelled project does not bill your own pocket.
• The deliverable cannot be resold — personalized and custom work is the classic case; the deposit is what makes starting rational.

In stages — milestones for multi-part work

Projects with natural phases (concepts → development → final files, in the designer walkthrough) invoice per phase: each milestone gets its own document describing what that phase delivered, and the final invoice credits any deposit against the total. The client never faces one large unexplained bill, and you never carry a whole project's value as one person's promise. Whichever pattern fits, agree it before the work starts and let the invoice record the agreement — never invent terms on the document that the deal did not contain. When the moment comes, the maker handles all three shapes; the pattern is in your agreement, not in the tool.

The hybrid most freelancers land on

In practice, experienced freelancers rarely pick one pattern for everything. They invoice small, quick jobs on delivery; they take deposits on anything long, custom, or materials-heavy; and they milestone the multi-week builds. The pattern follows the *risk shape* of the job: how much of your month does it consume, how much of it could you resell if the client vanished, and how well do you know them? Run any new engagement through those three questions and the invoicing pattern chooses itself — then write the choice into the agreement before the work starts, so the documents that follow are records of a deal, not proposals of one.

Whichever pattern you choose, protect it with one sentence in the agreement itself: “Invoicing: deposit of X to begin, balance on delivery, 14 days to pay.” Most payment awkwardness between freelancers and clients is not disagreement — it is two reasonable people carrying two different unspoken defaults. The sentence costs nothing at the start, when goodwill is highest, and it is priceless at the end, when the invoice simply matches what both parties already read.