As Jane Austin’s Mrs. Elton once put it, “there is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.” But, over time, all translators develop their own understanding of what a comfortable workplace is for them. In the mornings or evenings, at home or in a café, enjoying the silence or rocking to the beats pumping in your headphones — we all have our own favorite ways to work. In the end, what matters is not how, but how well we do it.

But two worrying questions can spoil even the most comfortable surroundings: Where to get new clients? and How to get paid?

Some customers pay freelancers using a we’ll-sort-it-out-somehow approach, not to mention international payments with their own tricky ways. Often, getting paid becomes a job in itself and takes almost as much effort as translating.

That is why Smartcat lets you not only translate and find clients, but also receive payments from clients located anywhere on the globe. So why not suggest your existing clients to pay for your services in a new way, via Smartcat?

You’ll surely make your client’s life easier by ridding them of boring paperwork (they already have some!). (By the way, we take care about your documents as well.)

How does it work?

• Smartcat issues a properly documented corporate invoice on your behalf. The customer pays it via wire transfer or by a bank card — right from the user interface.
• You receive the money on your Visa or MasterCard, according to the method you chose on the Payments page.
• The customer can leave feedback to your work, and we’ll add it to your profile.

We want to talk a bit more about this last item. Apart from money, all freelancers naturally want to get positive reviews about their work. In Smartcat, positive feedback in your profile is a surefire way to get new interesting projects. So if a happy client accepts your job, make sure to remind them that they can leave feedback in Smartcat. 3–4 positive reviews will be enough to get your profile to the top of search results and have it noticed by prospective clients.

The feedback loop & Smartcat Wave

Note that when you ask your existing clients to pay for your services via Smartcat, you are more likely to get positive feedback, as you already have the customer’s trust. The more reviews you receive, the higher you get in the search results, the more clients come to you. So you can trigger the “positive feedback circuit” all by yourself!

At Smartcat, we believe that translators should focus on translation and not on job searches or payment collection. So our focus is to make sure that you get interesting jobs and get paid for them easily and on time.

All in all, we want you to keep calm and translate. This is your main and everlasting skill that outweighs any technology (artificial intelligence included!). So use it, and Smartcat will take care of all the tools you’ll need! 😊

At the moment, issuing and getting paid by invoices is an optional feature, so drop us a line at support@smartcat.ai (subject line: “Instant payments”) if you want to be among the first to try it out.

Original post written by Nadia Hidalgo Diaz, Product Analyst at Smartcat.