Both your examples mention single digits hours, ie very small amount of money.
The problems tend to happen if there's larger amounts of money involved. So it's important as a contractor not to enable a situation where they owe you a lot of money, especially if you have no leverage.
> Both your examples mention single digits hours, ie very small amount of money. The problems tend to happen if there's larger amounts of money involved.
I've had lots of 100+ hour month contracts, some of which have spanned for years.
At some point you have to use your judgment to figure out what to do. If an individual with no registered business emails you asking you to put in 150 hours worth of work in a month, has a lot of grammar mistakes, seems weirdly aggressive over video calls or won't do video calls and tries to haggle down your prices then yeah it wouldn't be a good idea to wait until the end of the month to bill them.
But usually you'll have a chat or 2 with someone, get a good feel for them, propose a single page contract with a clear set of deliverables and compensation, then do the work and collect your money.
If you're doing project based billing with a new client it wouldn't hurt to ask for a decent chunk (33-50%) up front or at least earlier than your usual billing cycle for the first time.
re: ...no registered business... etc. I would typically take that as a "don't engage with them" sign.
One of the challenges of being professional is to know when to refuse clients and their work. Both for potential clients and on-going clients gone bad.
The problems tend to happen if there's larger amounts of money involved. So it's important as a contractor not to enable a situation where they owe you a lot of money, especially if you have no leverage.