Work not received

[maryluski]

We hired a freeland video editor in November and December 2017.  Although some videos were tranfered though Upwork and we have them, he claims the remainder of the videos were  completed and placed in Dropbox. 

  When our course developers went to upload the videos to our subdomain in January, only about 1/3 were there.  I realized this late January when the Developers said they could not find some of the videos.  Contacted video editor and he claims he was using a free dropbox and had to delete them.  He never warned us that they would be deleted from this dropbox.   We asked him to find the videos we paid to be edited and deliver, but four weeks later, he has charged us a weekly max of 40 hours, still no videos.    What is my best course of action.  At this point I want my money back for the undelivered work so I can hire someone else. 

[holymell]

If it was an hourly job, you can only dispute last week's hours and if he worked this week, you can dispute those, too, but you get a five-day review period after each week of work. If that period has passed, you can't do anything because you were supposed to have done it during that review period.

If most of this was done in 2017, I'm a bit confused as to why you didn't ask for the files then, or ensure you'd received them. The freelancer (assuming he did the work, which you could have checked by looking at the work diary), wouldn't be responsible for the files anymore. If the job was completed, it would be assumed that you, the client, had the files and were done with the freelancer.

Did you check the work diary? Review his work? If not, this might be an expensive lesson for you. But at least you can try to get this and last week's money back.

But you can't get money that you spent last year back just because you or your project manager failed to ensure you had all the files in your possession.

Good luck to you. I hope you are able to get the files. But again, if the job was supposed to be completed, the freelancer would be under no obligation to save those files.

[AveryO]

I'm sorry to hear your experience, MaryLu. 

Melissa is correct. You should still be able to dispute the hours your freelancer logged last week. Please read up on this help article to know how you can dispute your freelancer's hours.