Teleidoscope

Sat, Sep 22, 2007

Clients

Posted at 11:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I may not travel to Boston before the end of this contract. Until this week, the customer manager who was supposed to be signing off on my time sheets was not bothering to do so. And We have been informed that the soonest we will see any money, now that the timesheets are finally signed off, is the beginning of November, which is after the end of the contract.

Until we get paid for the work I did when I travelled to Boston in August, we don't have resources available for me to travel to Boston again.

We have constant problems getting our customers to pay us the money they owe anywhere close to on time. One reason for the company's existence is that it turns out we need a person working nearly full time just to get our customers to pay us.

We can't even borrow against our receivables to smooth out the cash flow. Even though all of actual clients are corporations, they make us bill through middle-man companies. Brokers who would deal with receivables from BigCorp are a lot less interested when the paperwork says we are owed the money from two guys from Mumbai working out of a Silicon Valley condo.

Yet I am sure the same people who don't mind delaying our payments would be outraged if their own paychecks and expense checks were delayed 6 or 8 weeks at the whim of the people who should be paying them. And even when they are not following the payments terms in the contracts we signed, they want us to live up to our side of the contract.

It is VERY annoying to have no money coming in, or expected any time soon, when I have been working steadily for more than a month. I think we need to propose non-payment penalties if the current folks want to extend the contract. (We won't get them. Big companies never agree to terms that would give us any leverage.) But we need to do something to give these arrogant bozos some incentive to actually live up to their side of the contracts.

I don't think pushing back on the next Boston trip is going be enough. I really hope some other job comes through for me for November even if the current lot wants to extend. I think they have lost their priority claim on my services.

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