darren

Hi,

How do you guys go about getting around problems with payment. Do you give them an agreed payment period and if the dont pay up you dont give them your product or service or do you work something out with them etc,

stevo

Pay upfront, then work begins.

Or if its a large project, pay 50%, then work begins.
Another 20% half way through, and the final 30% before the work is handed over.

If they don't pay, then they don't receive.
Quite simple really

st@rsky

Depends what you are selling/buying really..

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Anthony
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kris

Some of my clients that have shown they pay promptly are just invoiced at the end of a project. For other people I have to ask for some amount of money upfront before I can even start the job.

Super Mod

What kind of business are you talking about? Are you talking about a web hosting or web design business? If so, I think you should ask for 50-60% up front and the rest upon competition. Don't give them the final files until you've received the rest of your money. This way you force the client to pay you before handing over the goods.

Josie

I totally agree, Spencer, if your business is that sort. I've known a couple of designers who have been burned in the past by handing over the final files before receiving all the payment for their services. Another difficult problem is once you've built the website and passed along the original files, the client comes back with some minor changes and sometimes it is next to impossible to get payment for that extra, after-creation work (I'm not talking about errors that need to be corrected, but actual changes or additions to the final product).

For my type of work, I find that I can bill my trusted clients each month for whatever work I've done for them during the past month and they all pay promptly. For new clients, I rarely get involved in a large-scale undertaking as a first contact, so if I get burned, I don't lose much.

The type of client I really dislike are those that make you feel like they need your help so badly, but can't afford to pay hardly anything. I'm a soft touch for that ... usually it works out OK and I limit what I do for them because I don't make any money out of it, but a couple of times I've done work for ridiculously cheap prices and they haven't even paid me! That really burns me

kris

I have some customers that are faithful customers and I trust them enough to allow me to pay at the very end. But not all clients are so trustworthy.

Tim

How do you know you can trust them to pay you though?
That's a huge risk in my opinion, having clients wait right until the very end to pay you.

Even if you know them well, there is still that slight chance they will not cough up the payment.. that can be a big loss to you if you've put alot of time into their project.

kris

Yes this is true what you say. There are only a couple customers I allow to do this and I have been doing business with them for more than a year. They are for smaller writing projects. If it was a significant amount I would need to charge some fees up front.

Chris Gwynne

I worked with a partner a couple of years back. We got on great, wicked partnership. He was the designer, and I was the coder.

In the end, I trusted him too much, ended up giving him my work without any payment (he said he'd pay later), he never did. Got screwed for thousands.

Always get a down payment first. Make sure they know it's a deposit and if they don't pay 100% upon completion you'll keep the deposit (a contract comes in handy here really).

Only send over any material when you have 100% payment.