Why PGPR charges more for university clients

Here at PGPR, we’ve recently decided to start charging clients who pay through their universities (who we’ll call university clients) more than we charge those who are paying personally (personal clients).

If you are paying through your uni, you might be asking why we’ve decided to do this. After all, it can’t take us any longer to read your words than those of someone who is paying from their pocket, right? So how are these extra charges fair?

While you’re right that the work itself takes no more time, our experience has shown us that setting up and receiving payments from universities is much more time-consuming and stressful than receiving payments straight from clients. That’s why we’ve decided to raise our rates for those clients. Read on to find out more…  

  1. The associated admin for receiving payments from universities is much more time-consuming

When we are invoicing a personal client, all we need to do is send a couple of invoices: one for a deposit before the work commences, and one for the balance once the piece is done. The invoice lists all our payment details, and the client can use BACS or Stripe to pay. Quick and easy for everyone.

When a university is paying us, they usually need to set us up on their system. This involves filling in lots of forms, sometimes having to print them off and post them back. We often have to go through this process two or even three times when the forms get misplaced under the boss’s coffee cup or shredded by an overly zealous work experience student. Some universities need us to fill in a host of forms for every single job we do for them. This takes time – time which we’d much rather be spending reading your fascinating research.

No-one loves endless admin

Photo by Sear Greyson on Unsplash

2. Waiting for payments from universities can take a (really) long time

Once work is complete, we ask for payments in 14 days. Deposit payments are due immediately. We rarely have to chase personal clients for payments – the researchers who hire us are generally so pleased with our work that they can’t wait to pay, which makes us feel top-notch!

Sadly, the same cannot be said for universities. Their payment cycles tend to operate in a way that means suppliers should be paid within 30 days, rather than the 14 we need for our cash flow. And unfortunately, invoices, like other paperwork, go missing with alarming regularity in university payroll offices, meaning payments from university clients are always late. Sometimes by days, sometimes by weeks – often by months.

Chasing up payments takes time and really doesn’t feel good – so we have decided to be more lenient with the speed at which university clients pay us but ask them to pay us more to make up for this (sadly, inevitable) delay and difficulty.

We hope this blog has answered your questions about why we charge university clients more than personal ones. Of course, if you still think this is unfair, you are welcome to look for another proof-reading service. But we do hope you will stick with PGPR’s winning combination of expert proof-readers, quick turnaround times and honest, friendly service.