How do people pay you ?

I was thinking how if you are a freelance web designer do people pay you for what you have done?
I have people paying by check and bringing in the money by hand? IS this what most people do or what?

I won't lie, but i find payment by cheque as an outdated form of payment. Personally i'd be more keen on introducing the option to pay through Paypal (assuming the employer uses it themself) or other forms of direct payment.

By all means, nothing wrong with cheques. I would be unwilling to use it as a form of payment, but then i'm not a freelance designer and have never required payment for anything.

Money in hand gives you a chance to strengthen relationships that could use reenforcement.

Other than that, I'm with SB about Paypal. They make it really easy.

I thought about paypal but I was not sure how easy it would be to do its never the same amount of money twice. And don't paypal take some kind of % as payment? I don't know I don't use it much im not that big on ebay.

A lot of people use Paypal & all those people have to do is send funds to your account through their browser at Paypal.com
For those without a Paypal account, they can also pay with a credit card if you take <5 minutes to generate a payment link for them.
I believe there's also an invoice system that will make it easy to email an invoice to your clients.

I don't pay much attention to what the fees are exactly, but I do a good deal of $21 USD transactions and the fee on those is roughly a dollar.
The fee on a $200 transaction was roughly 6 dollars. I tend to get checks for anything over that, though now that I have my Paypal account all verified and have a Paypal Debt card I try to skip the checks.

The fees are no worse than those imposed by your local check cashing place or Western Union.

As for eBay, I haven't even visited the site in years, I couldn't even tell you what color it is. lol

ok paypal then - had a look on there site and for the life of me can not work out with I need therse lots like pay now and add to cart and donate what one would I need? I have an account all set up and working.

I'm guessing you're billing for services, so you'll probably want to use the Invoice service.

When you login it should have taken you to the "Account Overview" page, where there's multiple blue tabs at the top.

Click the "Request Money" tab and on the resulting page click the "Create an Invoice" link under the tabs.
It's pretty self explainitory from there, since this is your first invoice you'll pick "New Invoice" from the drop-down and fill out the resulting form.

You're likely going to want to bill for "Service" as the type, unless you're mailing off copies of created websites/etc through certified mail on DVD/CD.

After awhile it gets easier because you can save invoice templates and the contacts list will have the email addresses for everyone you've done business through via Paypal.

Only really half-related here, but this might be worth checking out too.
general-discussion/some-basic-accounting-with-paypal-and-openoffice-org-t93303.html

Paypal is normally the easiest. I have an issue with paypal as a consumer though! I have reached my 2000 dollar limit and if I want to charge anything else, I have to take out a paypal credit card. Otherwise, I have to attach my bank account to paypal. I think this is ridiculous!

What's wrong with attaching a bank account ?

Nothing wrong with this at all. Infact, i got 3 pence paid into my account by Paypal when i was linking the account to my bank account.

Been using paypal for the best part of 3-4 years now and never had any issues with any transactions and my account has always been secure.

I second that.

We accept all major credit cards and paypal. We do accept checks but I'd agree with SB... I too find it an outdated form of payment... just think of all the trees we'd save

I generally use Paypal for getting payments from my clients. And that's really good and reliable.

I get paid by direct deposits, but then those are all for people inside South-Africa, so they just do an internet funds transfer to my account.