Use These Strategies to Get Paid More Quickly You don't have to always be at someone else's mercy.

First step: Set better terms. Otherwise, you're at someone else's mercy.

At one of my companies, we sold six-figure packages of services to Fortune 500 companies. We assumed that getting a signature on a purchase order meant we'd be paid. That turned out not to be true, because our customers' accounts payable departments often had very different ideas. So once we wised up, we made sure someone in their accounts payable signed off on our payment terms before we provided the services -- and we made sure to find out exactly who would be handling our invoice and payment.

Related: Freelancer's Guide to Getting Paid Online