Ever levied late charges on you Agency?

[Shotto]

My Agency has paid me late in the last 4 out of 5 months. No idea why, client has paid them on the nail every time. It’s been up to two weeks late and only pay when I start ringing senior folk .

Anyone ever invoiced their Agency for late charges?

[GhostofTarbera]

1st sign they are in financial trouble, make sure you have ipse+ insurance before they go belly up and change to weekly payments


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[ladymuck]

1st sign they are in financial trouble, make sure you have ipse+ insurance before they go belly up and change to weekly payments


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^^ this. If it's a large agency IPSE+ will only get you so much but it's better than nothing.

Run a credit check on them too, to get an idea of what they've got going on. Tell them in writing, preferably to the accounts dept as the your agent contact won't care, that in light of poor payment performance your company is restricting credit to the equivalent of 1 week's invoicing (add a bit if you usually have expenses) and terms are payment within 7 days. Make it business like and formal, not personal

[ladymuck]

You could charge late fees, debatable whether they'd pay them. There's a specific rate you can charge iirc

[NotAllThere]

I've done it when the agent (actually a small consultancy) was getting quite late with my last invoice. I just followed the dunning process, added statutory interest as appropriate. Eventually they coughed up - but not the late charges. According to the law, I could continue to press for them, but couldn't be bothered; it was only £100 or so.

[herman_g]

I had a German client back in 2001 who was consistently late by two weeks and once 6 weeks late (despite the director and his model wife having enough cash to go to a 5 star place in Malysia for 4 weeks at that time).

When I wasn't really interested in extending, they wrote a penalty in the contract, continued to pay late and just ignored the late payment charges.

Then, the month I did an extra piece of work for the end client (not the client themselves who were the middle man) and I invoiced them quite a substantial amount. The bimbo secretary accidentally paid me in Eur rather than DM (the banking system was operating in both currencies before the actual cutover to Euros).

They asked me to please send back the extra cash as the "bank accidentally transferred the amount in euro".

I ignored the request, issued them a credit invoice the next month, they cancelled the contract and the end client signed me up direct (rather than take in the employee of theirs who they tried replacing me with).

They huffed and puffed and I ended up staying for 4 1/2 more years.

[northernladuk]

I worked for a micro consultancy who were paying random people 5 days to a week late quite regularly. No more than a week for some reason, just a couple of days. Didn't really bother me after awhile but some of the other contractors got in to a right froth about it. Eventually a number of them put a letter together to log it officially pointing out the contractual terms etc etc.

Well the consultancy actually sat up an listened. The previous payment timescale was 30 days. New renewals came with payment timescale of 40 days take it or leave it. They were never late again.

[JoJoGabor]

I did it to a consultancy I was working direct to. I charged £75 per late invoice and about 8% interest. They paid it too without quibble. They eventually went just bit only after I'd gone via an agency so the agency took the hit