These are a few of the lesser known ones which I find really helpful.

SHIFT+F5 goes back to the last edit you made in the document. Importantly this works even when you have closed the document, so I find it really helpful when working on a document over several weeks (such as when indexing it), for keeping track of where I am. It actually stores the last three changes made and cycles around them. Unfortunately it loses track of them when you save the document, so I select a word and press ctrl-B twice to bold, then unbold, it, just before closing it. That way, when I open the document next time, Shift-F5 takes me straight back to where I was last working.

When pasting text into Word (or trying to sort out someone else’s formatting):
CTRL+SPACEBAR removes all manual character formatting that is applied to the selected text and sets it back to the underlying paragraph style; and CTRL+SHIFT+N will apply Normal style

Still on formatting, we all know that CTRL+C and CTRL+V will copy and paste text, but CTRL+SHIFT+C and CTRL_SHIFT+V will copy and paste the formatting from one piece of text to another

When selecting text from a Word document to include in an index entry, whether by embedding or otherwise, it can be useful to change the case. Pressing SHIFT+F3 will cycle the selected text to all-upper-case, then all-lower-case, then Title-case. This is particularly helpful when selecting chapter or section headings and avoids having to retype the heading.

We should all know that pressing the Pilcrow button switches Show/Hide of hidden characters on and off, but, on Word2007/2010 in particular where it can be difficult to find, it is faster to use CTRL+SHIFT+8

One which, as indexers, we should all know – to insert an en-dash, press CTRL+NUMERIC KEYPAD MINUS SIGN

The book is in four sections:

• The basics of getting started the right way covers setting yourself up properly – your Profile, connecting to companies, using Recommendations, the importance of Groups, making Connections with other members, and creating your own Groups. Although I have been on LinkedIn for some time, there was quite a lot in here that I hadn’t discovered. I found it very helpful understanding how each of the features was intended to work.
• Finding what you want through searches and questions covers using Searches, and Questions & Answers. I had never been near the Search functions and it hadn’t occurred to me that I could use them to get contact information for people in companies. Rather than cold-calling a publisher, use LinkedIn to get contact names within the company.
• Using Applications  covers the top 10 add-ins which you can enable in your LinkedIn account. These are Company Buzz, WordPress, Blog Link, Google Presentation, SlideShare Presentations, Events, My Travel, Box.net, Reading List, and  Polls. All are explained in detail, step-by-step with examples of how they can be used to promote yourself. Again, some were new to me and the descriptions enabled me to identify which would be useful additions to my profile.
• Deciding on the best strategy is really an overview of how to use LinkedIn now that we understand the mechanics, and how to evaluate how well you are doing.

Throughout the book the instructions were very detailed, but perhaps occasionally too detailed. For  example, when being told how to use “Send a Message” we probably don’t need to be told “Then, click on “Send Message” to send it, “Cancel” if you decide not to do so.”

Navigating the book is an issue. This book costs £8.07 in its paper form, but only £2.14 on Kindle. The Kindle version does not have any illustrations, but as those are only screen shots that is not really a disadvantage, and it is the Kindle version I purchased. The Contents is very detailed, but, although it is linked on the Amazon Look-Inside version, it is not linked on the Kindle and isn’t even connected to the “Contents” bubble in the navigation menu. There is no index in either version, so getting around the book is not easy, and so perhaps it would have been better getting it on paper.

Is Top Secrets for Using LinkedIn Worth Reading?

This book has made me reassess my LinkedIn presence and realize that I can do more with it. I have added photos, products and services, thought more about recommendations and giving and getting them, who to include in my professional network and why, and I think my LinkedIn presence looks much more professional as a result. Because navigation is so poor, however, it is cumbersome to use as a reference book, but I did find that, even going through it once did produce some helpful results.

Instead, set yourself up as an Amazon Associate – go to the bottom of your local Amazon store page and, under “Make Money with Us”, click on “Become an Affiliate” or “Become an Associate”. You can then use one of the widgets to create an advert on your site for the book, which will show the image and will give you commission if someone buys it after finding it through your site. (Unlikely as that seems, it has happened to me!)

There are a variety of widgets available, ranging from the straightforward:

to the decidely flashy:

Alternatively you can list your books using LibraryThing which also provides widgets of your lists:

Both these techniques are free and neither involve you copying the image, stealing bandwidth, nor the possibility of breaching anyone’s copyright.

So how do you do a risk assessment? First, you list everything you can think of which could possibly go wrong and the consequences. This should be done without regard to the likelihood of these things happening, but list everything you can.

Then against each item you put a probability (say from 0 to 5) and an impact (say from 0 to 5) and multiply the two together. You then go through and look, particularly at the higher numbered items, and think what you could do to ameliorate them, that is either to avoid them happening or to make the consequences less significant.

Let’s look at a brief example:

risk assessment example

The list, of course, will be specifically personal to you. For example, the impact of locking oneself out of the house might be minimal for someone living with their spouse, but could be very problematic for someone living alone.

Looking at the very brief list above, with a score of zero we can safely ignore the first event, but the process of thinking about it can lead to other, more likely ideas.

Moving on, the car crash scenario is more probable. Actually the road outside my house is quite fast and an accident would be a problem. In fact, losing the internet connection for any reason would be serious. We can think of alternatives. I could transmit and receive files from a library or Internet café (so checking that the library has computers available and where an Internet café is might be an idea!). I could also look at using a plug-in mobile phone type connection. I go so far as checking that these exist, and ensuring that they could be obtained quickly, and that is enough to convince me I could cope with that scenario. I won’t actually take any action now but I know I have solutions available.

Turning to the electricity failure, I look at uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). Do they cost a fortune? Just what can they do? With a score of 16, I should probably be doing something rather than just thinking about it.

We can also extend this to the software we use on our machines. One event might be ‘wake up one morning and find browser has stopped working’. This actually happened to one SIdeline member last year, and although she knew other browsers were available she didn’t have a browser to download a new browser! Of course, the solution is to download a second browser while the first is still working – Firefox, Safari, Chrome – lots to choose from and all free, all very easy, as long as it is done in advance.

When I did a risk assessment a while ago, I thought I had loss of broadband service covered because my ISP provides a backup dial-up access service. And then I realized that the telephone number for the dial-up access was on the help pages on my ISPs website. Without my internet connection I wouldn’t be able to get it. This was quickly resolved by taking a copy of the details and keeping them on a file on my own computer, but had I not thought it through in advance, I would have only have discovered the problem when the broadband failed.

This is where risk assessments really show benefits, when you find that there are things you can do, which in many cases are low or zero-cost, but which can prevent real problems later. In my case, a year later the telegraph pole outside was struck by lightning, the line quality plummeted and my broadband actually did fail. Getting access to my ISPs help pages via dial-up really did make things easier.

Download and install Synergy on both machines.

On the machine with the keyboard and mouse you want to use, start Synergy:

Synergy main window

Check the box “Server (share this computer’s mouse and keyboard)” and click on Configure Server…

Synergy Server Configuration screen

Drag the picture of a screen in the top right hand corner onto the page, to a box to match the position of your laptop relative to your current computer screen. I had my laptop on the left of my desktop screen, so I put it in the box on the left. This controls the way the mouse moves around – off the left of the PC screen onto the laptop screen. It is put there as “Unnamed”.

Synergy screen settings

Double-click it and get the Screen Setting box. Change the name to match the other computers name, my laptop is JamesLamb-TOSH (as it is a Toshiba), and click OK, OK, to close both windows.

To find the current IP address of your computer, Start Button> Run… >Command Prompt

Then type: ipconfig

Somewhere near the top it will show the IPv4 address

Back on the main Synergy window, click Edit> Settings

Synergy settings

In the Interface box enter the IP address of the current PC.

Click on Start

Now move to the laptop, install and start the Synergy window, and click “Client (use another computer’s keyboard and mouse)”, and enter  the IP address of the main PC, the same IP address you found above.

Click on Start, and the mouse pointer will disappear.

Now go back to the main PCs mouse and keyboard, and move the mouse off the left of the screen, and, lo and behold, it moves onto the right hand side of the laptop screen. The keyboard now operates on whichever screen the mouse is on, and cut and paste work too – cut on one screen and paste on the other.

Add Dropbox to both machines, for your working area, so that files you are using are accessible from both machines, and you are ready to go. Browse the web on one and work on the other, or put your indexing software on the laptop, and the PDF on the other. That way, if there is a power failure, you don’t lose any work because your laptop just switches to running on batteries.

Dead Corners

Sometimes when you move the mouse down into the bottom left of the screen to access the start button, or to the top right to hit the close window button, you will overshoot and switch windows instead. Synergy allows you to avoid that by designating certain corners to be ‘dead’, so you can’t switch screens there. In the Screen Settings window, you define how large the corner is by entering the number of pixels – I would suggest 50.

You can use Synergy for more complex situations, even mixing Windows, Mac and Linux machines. There are still some situations where you need to use the laptop’s own keyboard, such as installing software, where the Windows installer locks down network access, preventing Synergy from operating, so don’t put the laptop where you can’t access the keyboard, but for normal working situations, it works so transparently you quickly forget it is there.

For example, something I do often is to switch Show/Hide on and off, to see where XE field entries are in documents, for example, or whether there is a space between an author’s initials.

In Word 2003, this involves clicking on the pilcrow button on the task bar. In Word2010, I have to click on the Home menu item, and then find the pilcrow button (hidden on the “paragraph” ribbon, presumably because the ribbon designer didn’t know what it did).

If I find a mistake in the author’s book which affects my index I will put in a comment. To insert a comment in the document, in Word 2003, I click on Insert, drag down to Comment, and release. In Word 2010, I have to click on “Review” and release, and then click again on the New Comment button (which has a tooltip of “Insert Comment”), and then I have to click on Home to get me back to where I was, because it is very unlikely that Review is where I now want to be. So, three operations instead of one, assuming that I didn’t make the silly mistake of assuming that “Insert Comment” would be on the Insert ribbon!

OK, I can see why they put the Insert Comment under Review rather than under Insert, at least it is a plausible location for it, but the Macros menu is under View! That makes no sense at all. Macros have never got anything to do with Views; they are always to do with making changes to the document in some automated fashion.

The final straw is that you can only have one ribbon open at a time. My computer monitor is quite large and so there is plenty of room within the Word window. With Word2003 I could have several toolbars visible at the same time, including putting them vertically down the side of the page. With Word2010 I am limited to having one toolbar open at a time and just wasting the blank space at the sides of the window to the left and right of my document.

No, this isn’t about learning curve. This will not get better as I get used to it. There are things which make Word2010 fundamentally slower to use than Word2003.

The one feature that I have found useful and better than Word2003 is that the Find now comes up as a window showing all of the occurrences in the document, in context, much like the Search function in Acrobat, meaning that I can now work without Acrobat open (which is a boon, given the memory leak problems associated with Acrobat Reader X!)

Back matter consists of the last pages in your book which provides additional information the reader should know about, such as Bibliographies, Appendices, Notes or Glossaries… Indexes are not recommended at this time.
Kindle Direct Publishing

Following that advice, when publishers started putting books on Kindle back in 2007 they often simply excluded the index, even when it existed in the print version. That practice has since changed, and now they tend to include the index, as it appears in the printed book, but with a caveat at the beginning saying that the reader should use the search facility to get from the index entry to the relevant passage in the book.

It is possible to include hyperlinks in a Kindle text, just like a webpage, creating a jump from one point in the text to another. At least one book formatter tried to use hyperlinks to overcome the index limitations by linking the index locators to the start of the page they referred to. This is very quick to do (just a matter of minutes) but doesn’t produce a very satisfactory result. The problem is that Kindle pages are not only small, they are variable. Readers can change between 8 font sizes, change the typeface, line spacing, words per line, and even rotate the screen, all of which drastically affects how much appears on a page. So if the original printed page was quite large, and the font small, say a page of endnotes, and the Kindle reader chose a large, easy-to-read font with generous spacing, it might be that one printed page covered 12 or 15 Kindle pages. Think what that means. The index says that the information is to be found on page 137, and the link takes you to the top of the printed page 137. If the relevant text is actually at the bottom of page 137, then the reader has to read through 15 Kindle pages of text before they find what they are looking for.

On 7th February 2011 Amazon announced that they were introducing ‘Real Page Numbers’ to the Kindle. This development, which has now been rolled out to everyone’s Kindle via software updates, means that it is possible to press Menu, enter “137″ and press “page”, and be taken to the text position in the Kindle which matches the top of page 137 in the physical printed book, assuming one exists. This is actually better than the linking mentioned above for two reasons. First, it is much quicker to use the GoTo function than to navigate across the screen using the arrow keys to reach the link – remember there is no mouse or touch screen on the Kindle. Second, it requires no special linking from the book publisher, so it can work for books from the back catalogue which have indexes. However, it still suffers from the problem, described above, that the page size does not match. There is no way of knowing where the print page ends on the Kindle – it could be three pages away or fourteen-and-a-half.

The only real solution is to link the index locator directly to the relevant character position in the text. Hyperlinks can do that but it requires that the indexer has put in the extra work and has specified precisely to where on the page the index entry refers. This can have been recorded using embedded indexing, or some form of XML indexing, but the extra work must have been done. To demonstrate that it can be done, I have, for the Society of Indexers, formatted for the Kindle their book, Occasional Paper 5, Indexing Children’s Books complete with a hyperlinked index. (Available from my download page, Kindle Store UK US DE)

This allows the user to go from the index to the correct text with a single click, and return to the same position in the index by pressing the Back button.

Some publishers who use XML and already require indexers to produce linked indexes will readily be able to produce indexes linked in this way, but what is still unaddressed is how the reader gets to the index. The Contents is a special button in the Goto menu, but the Index is not there. This is because Amazon say that the Kindle does not support indexes. In fact, a simple software change would appear to be all that is required and usable indexes will be possible. Of course, some indexes will be not linked by the publishers and others will, so some indexes will me more useful than others – but that is nothing new.

In the beginning was the scroll. Some time later came the book – the scroll was chopped up into fixed size pages which were then numbered sequentially. That opened the way for the index – a collection of headings together with indicators showing on which page the required information appeared. And now, and in the future, we are going back to the scroll. Instead of books with multiple pages, books are being published with a single, very-very long page. These books are not on physical paper, as with the scrolls of antiquity, of course, but on a computer screen. So imagine a web page containing the whole contents of a book. In your browser you see a single page on the screen, and can move to the next page by clicking on the scroll bar. You still view the book a page at a time, but, and this is the key point, the size of the page is not fixed. You can make the browser window larger or smaller, zoom to increase or decrease the font size, and the page size changes. You might think that very few books are published in this way, but you would be wrong. This is exactly how the Kindle works. To publish on a Kindle the book is converted into a webpage and then displayed a page at a time on an e-ink screen. By changing the font size or jumping to a particular starting point in the text, you change where your pages start and end. If you view the book on the bigger screen Kindle DX you get a different pagination.

So the future of books is the scroll, which leaves a problem for indexes. They relied on the pages. The solution is to have the indexes point to something in the text smaller than pages – specific paragraphs, specific words or individual character positions. There are two ways of doing this – tagging and embedding.

Tagging is adding little markers in the text and then using those markers in the index. This could be done simply using the character number – instead of “page 123″ we refer to “character 492,761″. Alternatively a smaller number of more convenient tags can be added by the publisher, perhaps one for each line, and the index uses those (Elsevier does this). Or perhaps the indexer themselves adds tags to the text and uses those in the index (CUP-XML does this). What the actual locators look like doesn’t really matter because when displayed on the e-book screen it is simply a link for the reader to click on.

Embedding actually stores the index headings themselves directly in the text at the required character position. A separate run of a computer program is required to go through the text and create an index using the character numbers we talked about in tagging, but that can be done very quickly.

Storing these tags and headings in the actual text itself would, of course, be unacceptable if they could be seen by the reader, so it is necessary to have some form of text which is more complex than simply characters and letters, which allows information to be stored invisibly. There are many different ways of doing this as no-one has come up with a format which everyone agrees to be perfect. All word-processors have their own formats, such as MS Word with .doc and .docx, or OpenOffice with .odt. Web pages use a format called HTML which uses tags inside angle brackets to enclose invisible information, so <title>  </title> indicates indicates that the text in between the tags is to be used as a title for the browser window but would not be displayed to the reader as part of the text. XML also uses angle bracket tags but goes a step further and allows the document creator to define their own tags. So if you wanted to use <browserheading> </browserheading> instead of the <title> tag then you could do so. It also means that you can create tags for things which no-one else has thought of. As a publisher you can come up with a tag system better than anyone else and then reap the commercial rewards of that system.

So what does this mean for the indexer? First, that indexing has to be more precise. Rather than identifying on which page a concept appears the indexer must identify exactly where the topic starts and ends, right down to the character position. That always involves more work. Second, the indexer will have to use a range of software tools or techniques to record the index information in the document. This might be software tools involving drop-down menus or special keystrokes, or techniques involving colored numbers printed on PDFs. Furthermore, these software tools and techniques will come mostly from the publishers, who are the inventors of their own systems, often designing them concentrating on facilities to handle page presentation, such as illustrations and tables, and not the work patterns of the indexer.

As I mentioned there is no single format on which everyone agrees, nor is their any sign of one being agreed in the near future. As indexers we need to be agile. Investigate and find a format in which you think there will be demand for indexes. Create your own techniques and even tools, using word-processor macros, spreadsheets or programmable function keys on keyboards, to make your indexing process efficient for that format. Pursue work in that format. Blog and tweet about your learning experiences and maybe work will find you. If that doesn’t take off, learn another format. That adds to your portfolio of skills, your menu of services offered. Having said that, it does seem that indexing is in danger of becoming a Red Queen’s Race.

When faced with an unpaid bill the first thing to do is to decide why it has not been paid. In order to pay the client must have three things: the administrative ability to pay, the intention to pay and the money. I label the lack of each of these things : incompetence, malicious intent and desperation, respectively.

I cannot offer any simple rules to distinguish between these, but it is worth looking back through all the previous communications with a fresh eye. It is a judgement you have to make based on your experience with the client so far, tone of communication, what they have actually said, and any news reports you can find elsewhere about the company. It is not easy, but it is important, as it affects how you should proceed.

Incompetence – providing help

This category is where the client intended to pay, acted with the best motives, but somehow the payment didn’t get to you. It could be that the editor stood a cup of coffee on your invoice, then a stack of papers and then lost it down the back of the desk. The accounts department have not even received it yet. Perhaps the money was sent but not to your account. Maybe they paid, but they sent the wrong amount.

There are many such scenarios, but the key thing is that they are trying to be helpful but just not succeeding. This means that putting pressure on them will not work at all – that can only make them try harder and we know that trying is not the problem. In fact they may well become less competent under pressure. We need to help, not pressure, them. We need to make it as easy to pay us as possible. Measures to combat this start even before the invoice is late.

First, include all possible information on the invoice. The invoice should spell out clearly exactly how much needs to be paid (don’t make them work out early payment discounts, calculate gross or net of vat, etc., have a clear, bold “To pay” figure), by when, and all information they need to make the payment. So that should include, for cheque payment: to whom the cheque should be payable and where it should be sent,  but also include an email address for them to send a “remittance advice” so that you know when the cheque is on its way. Also include contact details for “payment queries” including a phone number and email address – if they are unsure about anything, don’t force them to look something up elsewhere.

Include your bank details so that they can make payment by direct credit/BACS/FastPay. Simply giving your bank details is not a security risk – you give those details out every time you write a cheque. Making an electronic payment involves them sitting at a terminal; writing a cheque involves an envelope, a stamp, a covering letter and a trip to the post office. For you, direct payment to your bank means that the money gets into your account a week or more earlier than with a cheque and you don’t have the extra work of banking the cheque.

Send the invoice electronically, preferably in a PDF format so that it is readable on whatever computer hardware they use. This means that it can be delivered quickly to the client, stored electronically by them and they can print extra copies when the coffee hits it or when it gets lost. Why force them to make an embarrassing phone call to ask for another copy and give them the opportunity to put the phone call off.

Make sure that they can cut and paste from the invoice. I have actually been the recipient of an invoice which was a .jpg image! That meant that I had to copy the bank account number by hand in order to make the payment – one more opportunity to get the number wrong and for the money to go astray. And if they pay the money to the wrong person it is going to take time to investigate and you are going to suffer delays – their mistake, your problem.

Include a unique invoice number on your invoice. If you are a limited company or registered for VAT then this is a legal requirement, but sole traders do not have to. However, it is good business practice because it makes discussing invoices much easier. You can enquire about “my invoice xxx-xxxx” and everyone knows when they have found the correct one. If you send two invoices for the same amount, for example, say you indexed two 200 page books, then they have the opportunity to think that it is the same invoice twice and only pay once.

Some indexers are concerned when starting out about the business information implicit within the invoice number – that sending out invoice “00001″ trumpets that this is their first contract. That is easily avoided by using a suitable numbering scheme, for example, “2010-0001″ which says it is the first invoice of the year, or “1003-001″ which admits only to being the first invoice of March 2010.

Once the payment is late and we need to enquire about its progress, it is best to accompany the email by a Statement. The statement should show the current situation of the client, and as much information as could possibly be helpful. So, if there has been a recent invoice for a similar amount, make sure that it shows on the statement too so that it is clear that this is a different invoice. Ensure that any other invoices raised since then also appear – they may not be overdue yet but they emphasize how much money you have actually lent to the client and how much they rely on your services. Also, include the payment instructions again – why force them to find the copy of the invoice when you can include the payment and contact details on the statement. Help them make the payment now and worry about finding the paperwork afterwards.

For future payments, you can consider sending a statement a week before they are due to pay, just to remind them, or a regular statement at monthly intervals after the last statement you sent. (I wouldn’t send statements when there is no outstanding payments, though).

If being helpful doesn’t work, at some point you may decide that they are purposely trying to delay payment. This takes us to our next category, malicious intent.

Malicious intent – applying pressure

This is where the company, by whatever means, is seeking to take advantage of the cash flow benefits of late payment. They have the ability and money with which to pay, but don’t intend to yet. They want to hang on to your money as long as possible.

In business it is expected that people have administrative procedures to go through in order to make a payment and so it is conventional to allow 30 days payment terms. That means that the seller supplies the goods and notionally lends the payment money to the client, free of interest, for 30 days. In economics this is called Trade Credit, and is a major source of finance for many companies. Some companies, however, purposely extend this – not by having contractual payment terms of longer than 30 days (which is legal and acceptable – everyone knows what they are agreeing to up front) but by stealth. One large financial institution for which I worked in some years ago had a policy of never paying any invoice until it was at least 30 days overdue.

This is rarely the fault of the particular editor or person we are dealing with directly. Usually they will be saying that they have passed the invoice onto Accounts, but Accounts are very slow and there is little that anyone can do about it. It can even be built into the company’s procedures – we might be told that our invoice has missed the Accounts’ cheque run for the month and so will be paid next month. It is important to understand what is going on here – it is of no interest at all to us how the inside of their company works. Their company made a commitment to make a payment before a certain date and they seem incapable of making it. Would they really say that to the taxman or their electricity supplier? Here we do need to apply pressure. We need to make it better for them to pay us than to not pay us. We need to introduce consequences for not paying us.

First we need to understand what our options are – to identify the tools we have at our disposal. We then need to establish a scale of retaliation – a ladder of escalation, so that the client understands where they are on that scale, so that delaying payment makes things progressively worse. It is no good pressing the nuclear button on day 1, you have nowhere to go after that. The objective here is to get the client to pay, not to spend time chasing them through the courts.

In the UK there is the Late Payment Legislation which was designed to help small companies get paid by large companies. You NEED to read the detail and understand it for yourself HERE, but the key features are:

• Once a payment is late, the late payer becomes liable for 
  • An administrative late-payment charge of £40 (£70 for a debt of over £1000)
  • An interest charge of 8%+Bank of England Base Rate on the outstanding amount
• The only allowable reason for non-payment is intentional withholding of payment because of dissatisfaction with the product
• The charges may be invoiced at any time over the next 7 years
• You may choose to waive the charge, but that does not remove the right to it, so it can still be invoiced later.

Of course, when pressuring a client we don’t want to destroy the client relationship if we can help it. A particular advantage of this late payment charge is that it is automatically applied by the Law of the Land, and not by any decision on our part. So we can use that to distance ourselves from the imposition of the charge, whilst sympathizing with the client and helping them to pay us, but nevertheless pointing out the details of the charge to them.

One company uses this legislation by invoicing for the charge immediately the debt is overdue, and then deducting the charge off their next invoice if payment is made and this is the first offence.

Another tactic is to believe the company when they say it is a one-off oversight and to waive the charge. If however late payments persist and you eventually decide to dump the client, you can then invoice them for all the late payment charges over the previous years.

My procedure is to notify the company immediately they have gone overdue, emphasizing that they are continually accruing interest on the debt until payment is actually received by me, not simply despatched, so I (helpfully) emphasize that direct payment into my account will stop the debt accumulation as quickly as possible.

Reactions to this differ. Some immediately pay the outstanding debt and the charge – I am left in no doubt that it was a genuine mistake and our relationship is not impaired in any way. Others try to ‘chivvy  along’ Accounts and the debt is paid, but not the charge – I tend to view this with suspicion but do not pursue the charge while this is a solitary oversight. If it were to happen again, then I would pursue the charge on the old debt and the new.

If payment is not forthcoming at all, then a solicitor’s letter is the first stage of taking legal proceedings, and does not cost very much. Often, the fact that you have got a solicitor involved, which means that the client knows that you are practically prepared to pursue the matter, will be sufficient to prompt payment.

Whether you do then pursue the matter through the small claims court will depend on the size of the debt, whether you wish to commit the time, and whether there is a realistic chance of recovery. Of course, if there isn’t, because they probably don’t have the money, then we should have been considering this under the last category – desperation – below.

So, it is important to develop a ladder of actions, such as: email highlighting late payment charge; statement including charge and reminder; warning that you will proceed to legal action; solicitors letter; court action.

Desperation – salvaging what we can

This category is where the client doesn’t actually have the money to pay you. As with incompetence, applying pressure could have adverse affects. Consider the situation which the client may be in. Perhaps a large client of theirs has delayed payment and they do not have the cash to pay you. Very likely, you are not the only creditor demanding payment. They have numerous people, calling them up regularly, demanding payment and making threats. They just want to be left alone to perhaps get on with more work to get the money to pay everyone. Under such circumstances the threat of legal action might be viewed as being left alone for a while and might actually seem attractive!

The key judgement here is whether the client is going out of business – will they survive? If they are a large company and they say they can’t pay your invoice, due 10th December, until 10th January because it has to come out of next years budget (or some such drivel), are you confident that you will get your money then? Search out all the news stories you can about the company; ask among other freelances who might work for them whether they are getting the same story.

If you view that the company might not survive, then make them an offer – explain that they have already incurred a late payment fee, but that you would waive that if they paid you 50% or the whole debt now and 50% in 30 days time. From their point of view, this is a great deal – suddenly they get one creditor off their backs, they get 30 days extra interest free loan on half the money, they don’t get hassled for 30 days, and they retain a good relationship with their client (i.e. you).

But from your point of view this is good too – there is a real prospect that the company will fail and you will get nothing (or at least very little, and that long delayed) – you get 50% of the money, in your hand, now. That will probably help alleviate any cash flow problems you have, and you are perceived as going out of your way to be helpful to the client.

So it is key to identify what situation you are in. Proper preparation and professional practices reduce the prospects of late payment and convey to the client your expectation of being paid on time. Being paid by the time you agreed should be the norm. You deliver your work on time. They should deliver the payment on time.

Knowing how long you spend on each job is critical for an indexer (or at least any indexer who hopes one day to raise their prices). The indexing programs will record how much time you spend actually working with a particular file but other time spent on the index can be just as important. Time spent printing proofs, discussing the job with the editor, working up a quote, answering queries from the author about the final index or teaching them how cross-refs work, can all add significantly to the overall time for the job. A really chatty customer can change a lucrative book into a breakeven one.

A tool I am now using for tracking time is Grindstone. This is a free program, which runs on all platforms and has some nice features.

Installation was automatic and problem free. It is quite usable straight-out-of-the-box, but I found it helpful to group jobs together by client. To do this, first go to the Profile menu and choose “Configure Default”. On the “Custom Fields” tab, click “Create” and add a custom field called “Client”.

Entering a task is very fast, requiring minimal input of information, just the task name and the due date.
We can also click the “Custom Values” tab and enter the client name in the “Client” field we have now created. You can also add notes if you wish, and I decided the easiest thing to do was to paste in the commissioning email from the client, as it has all the detail I need to remind me about the job.

Choosing “View” on the main menu we now have “Group Tasks” and can select “Client” and the tasks for each client are grouped together in the window.

To track time against a task, select the task and click on the triangle button in the bottom left corner. This brings up a “Stopwatch” which sits unobtrusively at the top of your screen and from where you can also stop and start timing.

One really nice feature is that when you stop using your mouse and keyboard for a while, when you return it asks you where you have been! This works really well for interruptions. For example, when working on an index and the postman rings the doorbell delivering proofs for another index. You receive the proofs, check them, punch holes and put them in a folder, and realize that you have no idea how long that took and when you stopped. You return to your computer and Grindstone knows you have been away for exactly 17 minutes and you can log that time to index B and get straight back to index A.

Overall Grindstone is easy to use, which means that you do actually record time against tasks and get a much more accurate figure for how much of your time an index really took, and when it comes to deciding which customers to keep and which to release back into the wild, accurate information is essential.