The customer does not close the fixed-price contract for the third month. Wait until the victory or close it yourself?

Question

Upwork

For those who are not interested in the background, you can immediately go to the next paragraph, but it may help to better understand the essence of the customer. In general, I'm new to upwork itself. There are still few orders. I got a rather simple fixed-price order for parsing text in a document over 600 pages. Before accepting the order, I quickly sketched out a script, ran it according to the provided sample and threw an offer for $25, which was accepted. I sincerely intended to finish the job in 10-15 minutes, because the task was completed before it was taken. When running through the whole document, the script uncritically stumbled over spelling and punctuation errors a couple of times. Despite the fact that this was not originally specified, the customer asked to add a handler for similar errors. I agreed, and then it started! The "project" conceived for 15 minutes threatened to stretch out for several hours of hard work: the customer applied the script to previously unspecified documents with a different structure and formatting, where the script messed up as expected. I adapted (having spent 4 hours by this point, probably). And hereOstap suffered from the customer Wishlist climbed. He himself fiercely promised a bonus and asked to quickly screw in the features. Realizing that I had to work on a conditionally final task (because the Wishlist climbed one after another) for at least 2 full working days, I added only two features as a sign of goodwill and firmly but politely expressed that I had fulfilled this contract, and if he wants more , then I am ready to work by the hour and further under the new contract.
And it was at the moment of completion of the work that the customer urgently needed to hit the road somewhere for a week for two days, not accepting the work performed (although he was in a hurry before that). Returning two days laterweek, the customer silently transferred $25, promised to check the script tomorrow and went offline for another two weeks. Two weeks later, he reminded me that he had paid, said that he would check the script tomorrow and ... disappeared. It was at the end of August. In my profile, the work hangs in the status "In progress". And it really annoys me that after the customer accepts it in, say, October, I will have a completed order hanging in my profile, from which it will be clear that I worked for $25 from August to October. I wrote to the customer with a request to close the contract. He promised, promising to turn to me again (God forbid). But the order stubbornly hangs in the profile to this day. Can something like this threaten me? Will a profile entry about a job for 2 months for $25 at a fixed price look compromising?
PS
The customer is from the USA, but an Indian (he didn’t pay any attention right away, he just looked at the country).

Answer 1

Yes hammer

Answer 2

You can close the order yourself without any problems, there is nothing wrong with that. It's just that the customer will not be the first to leave a review, but you. The money will be automatically debited to your balance after the required time has passed.
Moreover, after 2 weeks, the customer will lose the opportunity to leave feedback for such an order. If you are worried that $ 25 in your profile will be stretched for two months, then you should not worry - either the viewer will understand that the customer is gone - little experience on Upwork quickly makes it clear that this is a common situation, or you can generally hide the amount of money paid to you for a specific task - as a result, fixed prices will be just like fixed prices, and who knows how much you earned there in the end and what you did.

Answer 3

You close milestone successfully with payment, and let the work itself hang Fixed price. With new works, you simply open new stages, with the required amount of escrow deposit. It should not affect the statistics, at least I did not notice anything bad.