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If your bid is chosen by the buyer as the winner (usually after some negotiation back and forth), you'll receive an
email notification.
The bid amount has already been taken from the seller and put into escrow, so you no longer have to worry about the buyer being a 'deadbeat', like most
independent consultants do. And now you're ready to do your thing!
How you continue depends on the project payment type the buyer chose when they posted this project:
Pay for deliverables
We cannot over-emphasize the importance of corresponding regularly with the buyer to best guarantee
that they sign off on the finished work. There are 2 ways to do
this:
1) Via the same Rent A Coder bidding system that you
used to communicate with the buyer before they accepted your
bid.
This method is recommended for the majority of projects because
all correspondence between yourself and the buyer (as well as associated
documents) are archived on the site. This is helpful when:
a) The buyer and yourself disagree over what is to be delivered. This is the #1 best way to protect yourself should a disagreement arise and you need to go into arbitration. Without this documentation, you may not be able to proove that you did not or did agree to the item in dispute.
b) You'd like to have a complete reference of all conversations, as well as associated documents are stored in one convenient to access place.
c) You have multiple bids open on the site and you want a more convenient way to manage them.
2) Simply email the buyer
directly.
This is only recommended for small 1-2 day projects where
no formal documentation is required. To email a buyer directly, use their email
address as found in the 'contact information' section of the bid request.
To facilitate good communication, every Friday you are working on the project, you must file a status report. Do this using the
'file new report' button.
(Note: If your project is < $150 then no status report is necessary.)
When you're finished with the work, click on
the "Report Work Complete", and the buyer will be notified.
If your deliverables are at all time sensitive, don't forget to email them directly
to the buyer, in addition to filing them on this site, as the site attachment delivery can get backed up during peak times. This is the best way to cover yourself!
Pay for time
To report your time to the buyer, you download and install the Rent A Coder timecard desktop application on your computer.
This application allows you to report your time. To prove to the buyer that you are working, every few minutes, it takes an image of your webcam (required) and your desktop.
- Startup the application and choose the project you're working on from the list, and click "punch in" to begin work. Once you do, it's important to work only on the buyer's project (to avoid a possible
arbitration and poor rating/loss of account as detailed in the next step).
- You can see an overview of your time on the weekly timecard page:
Click here to see full size
- You can click on any item to see the detailed daily view. This shows you all the images and you can also notate items as well as exclude them from being paid for:
Click here to see full size
- If you forget to log time (or wish to subtract time), you add manual entries back on the weekly timecard page:
Click here to see full size
Remember that the buyer is under no obligation to approve manual entries. So it is much safer to remember to login and logout using the desktop timecard application, instead of relying on manual entries to record your time.
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