Is there a way to pay with task completed and milestones achieved?

[0022ae29]

I am a client and I am woring with an upwork professional, who is not bad. However, she replies my messages late and she keeps missing the deadlines. She promised a 6 week work for my project, out of which 3 weeks have passed. I was charged full 40 hours weekly for the past 3 weeks. However, she has told me she will need 5 more weeks. I believed it was reasonable, so I agreed. Since then, she has been regulary missing deadlines and not quick enough with replying me messages and when she does reply, she keeps reassuring me that she will finish within the timeline. 

Therefore, I asked her to give me small goals on a weekly business so I can track her progress. Still, she has not met the deadlines she has been giving me but still charging full weeks without any progress to show. 

I do not want to cancel the contract and start over as I have spent qutie a lot of time with her. May I know if there is anything I can do to make sure she honours her own timeline? Something like, I only pay when certain To-Dos are met done. It seems like Upwork just keeps charging me, and there's nothing I can do to refute the charges even though I am not getting any job done.

Please, any help is appreciated. 

Thank you very much. 

[prestonhunter]

re: "May I know if there is anything I can do to make sure she honours her own timeline? Something like, I only pay when certain To-Dos are met done."

There is no client-side user interface controls or functionality that allow you to do that. Something like that is completely unnecessary for any client who understands how to use Upwork properly.

In my opinion:

You are doing this wrong.

You should not be relying on a single freelancer.

You should have two other freelancers cross-trained in this project. And you assign the best, most cost-effective freelancers to most tasks.

Right now you have no way of comparing her work to the work done by other freelancers on the project. That is a serious missed opportunity. You could be saving so much time and money if you had other freelancers working on this project.

Use only hourly contracts for this.

You are relying too much on an unreliable freelancer.

If your project is important too you, don't rely in a single freelancer, even if she does fantastic work.

[39e63939]

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Preston H wrote:

re: "May I know if there is anything I can do to make sure she honours her own timeline? Something like, I only pay when certain To-Dos are met done."

There is no client-side user interface controls or functionality that allow you to do that. Something like that is completely unnecessary for any client who understands how to use Upwork properly.

In my opinion:

You are doing this wrong.

You should not be relying on a single freelancer.

You should have two other freelancers cross-trained in this project. And you assign the best, most cost-effective freelancers to most tasks.

Right now you have no way of comparing her work to the work done by other freelancers on the project. That is a serious missed opportunity. You could be saving so much time and money if you had other freelancers working on this project.

Use only hourly contracts for this.

You are relying too much on an unreliable freelancer.

If yiur project is important too you, don't rely in a single freelancer, even if she does fantastic work.

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Thank you for the advice, that sounds reasonable!

[luqman_mak]

You could use fixed price contracts that allow you to set milestones that only pay when the milestone is met and not based on hour charges. For this, you set a target, a fixed price it and then you fund that target for the freelancer to start working on it. When your freelancer submits work for that tagert, you have 14 days to review and request changes.

You can read more about it here:
https://www.upwork.com/infographics/fixed-price-vs-hourly-project