One of my current clients has a customer who owes him $125,000.
Yikes.
Everywhere but California that's a HOUSE.
Needless to say, no one puts in all the hard work of becoming an entrepreneur, starting a business, finding a client, winning the business, starting the contract, and working for several months to just labor for free.
Side note: I always find it fascinating how blase employees are when you ask them about getting paid. How long would they stick around and work for free if their company didn't pay them?
While there's no way to 100% control what someone else does, avoiding this sort of situation starts early in the client relationship – before any work has been done for the client.
Here's my first tip – did you know that YOU should anchor the expectations for when the client pays you?
For our IT consulting practice, our contract says we invoice weekly and that the terms are net 15 (meaning the check is due to me 15 days after the invoice is sent).
Now, many clients will balk at this and want to negotiate (or just ignore the net 15 and pay net 30). But it's worth having in that contract anyway. Because by anchoring at weekly invoicing and net 15 terms, when the client comes back requesting monthly invoicing and net 90 terms… well, we have room to negotiate now. We can meet in the middle rather than them dictating that I work for free for 4 months before I even send an invoice.
In case you missed it, yes, you can negotiate terms with even big clients. Maybe not all the clients all the time, but yes, some of the clients some of the time. You'll negotiate more often if you try than if you don't.
Once the contract is signed and the client sends it to you, you can send them back a countersigned version or at least an email acknowledging receipt. I suggest when you do this you include your W9 with a suggestion that your contact go ahead and send it over to accounts payable to get them in the system and asking if, when the time comes to send invoices, you should send those to your contact or if there's a contact in accounts payable you should use. This goes ahead and gets your contact thinking about the fact that yes, just like them, at some point you will want to be paid by their employer, and hopefully gets the ball rolling to connect you to accounts payable.
The advantage of going ahead and connecting with AP is that often clients use a pile of paperwork as a way to hang on to their money longer. Instead of sending you payment, they send you paperwork. By getting this out of the way when the contract has just been signed INSTEAD of waiting until the work is performed, invoiced, the terms time has past, and now the payment is past due, you (hopefully) accelerate the process of getting paid. Basically, at that point they can't pretend that you are the reason you are not getting paid. 🙂
Along those lines, be sure you invoice in a timely manner with the frequency you promised. While usually our focus is on delivering the services (as it should be), the faster you get that first invoice to the client the faster you work out any kinks in the process and start the flow of money. And be sure to build an hour into your calendar each week to work your past due invoices so clients know you are on top of things and not to be ignored.
By anticipating what homework you will need to do before accounts payable sends that first check and by being extremely prompt in your invoicing you help to set the expectations that they will also be prompt in paying you.
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