Negotiating Payment Structure

On projects that take quite a long time (like several months), you should make sure to negotiate payments in installments. Even though the prospect of being paid quite a lot of money after the project is exciting, it doesn’t help to pay your regular bills while you’re working on it.

This is something that gets overlooked easily in the excitement over a big deal and can cause quite a lot of trouble. A standard deal would be 50% upfront and 50% upon completion of the project, however, on a project that is even longer than “regular” projects, this might not be the best choice. In such situations, even more installments are negotiated, usually fixed to either a date (less common) or a certain stage of progress of your work (like “all sketches done” or “orchestration finished” etc.).

You should also make sure that every job that you want to outsource is financially covered and therefore mentioned in your money deal. If you need a certain amount of the budget at a certain stage in order to pay your orchestrator, this should be mentioned in the deal.