Tell HN: Be careful when using Upwork for consulting work

Hi HN,

I thought I would warn some of you that might be using Upwork for consulting/freelancing about the first issue with payment protection I came across (I have logged 3k hours on the platform and received a top-rated plus badge, whatever it means).

To me, the 5-20% fee Upwork was taking for projects was fair, given their hourly protection programme, where if you use their tracking app that logs screenshots, keyboard and mouse activity then your payment for work was guaranteed.

The app has a feature where it will not log time if your keyboard and mouse are not active enough, what I did not know up until yesterday is that even if the app logs the work Upwork can decide that the activity was not enough and they will reimburse the client at their discretion.

In case anyone is interested how the process looks in detail: you get two e-mails:

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1st one:

Refund Notification

Hi Mateusz, You refunded $X to CLIENT_NAME.

2nd one:

Upwork Help: Reversal Notification: Upwork Hourly Payment Protection

We are writing to inform you that your client’s payment was unsuccessful for the week of March 21, 2022 - March 27, 2022. As such, we have reviewed your Work Diary and reversed hours logged that did not meet the criteria for Upwork’s Hourly Protection policy.

The following hours have been reversed back to your client:

Reason: Low Activity

Upwork will reverse time for the following when reviewing your Work Diary:

  * Manual time
  * Low activity
  * With insufficient or no work memos
  * With more than 10 minutes of activity not pertaining to the job itself
  * Activity that violates Upwork’s Terms of Service

Please note that the reversal will show up in your transaction history as a "Refund" even though the transaction was a reversal processed by Upwork. If your client approved the hours reported in your work diary, please ask them to make a bonus payment to you for the amount reversed.

To resolve this issue going forward, please use the Upwork Team app to track your time and make sure that your hours are logged according to the Upwork Hourly Protection guidelines: https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211062568-Upwork-Payment-Protection

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As you can see, there will be no warning, so you will not have a chance to even get in touch with the client to start resolving the problem.

To sum up, if you do the work and the client has an issue with payment you can see part of your money disappear if you didn't use your mouse and keyboard, even though you were on a call with clients for multiple hours (documented by the screenshot) and you did not need to use your mouse and keyboard all that much because you are a consultant.

The cases when this will most likely hurt you are when the client has issues with payment or challenges your work.