Huxley - 28 Days to pay

[oracleslave]

I really don't see what the problem is.....

Me either, unless your a temp it all sounds completely normal to me.

[NotAllThere]

They will be on the same terms from the end client (if not worse). 30 days is pretty much standard, you have just got spoilt by the greater number of agencies that are willing to do a 7-10 day turnaround recently.

Recently? It's the switch away from 7 days that's recent. It's only in the last few years that this has started to become normal. Before then it was the norm to have payment within a few days of receipt of timesheets and invoice - for agency contracts.

My current contract is payment within 21 days. Before then, I was direct, so payment in about 30 days. Before then - 2005-2006 - payment was the day after electronic receipt of invoice and timesheet!

[Ardesco]

Recently? It's the switch away from 7 days that's recent. It's only in the last few years that this has started to become normal. Before then it was the norm to have payment within a few days of receipt of timesheets and invoice - for agency contracts.

My current contract is payment within 21 days. Before then, I was direct, so payment in about 30 days. Before then - 2005-2006 - payment was the day after electronic receipt of invoice and timesheet!

2003-2005 i was on a 6 week turnaround which was quite painful at first. Generally speaking this have got faster since then, however I still expect 30 days. That was you get a nice surprise if the cash gets to you quicker.

[meridian]

My last agency was a 3 1/2 day turnaround - invoice in by lunchtime Monday, payment in account by First thing Friday morning.

Am direct with a client now, the quickest payment has been 5 weeks, the longest waiting time was 4 months and 1 week

[tim123]

My last agency was a 3 1/2 day turnaround - invoice in by lunchtime Monday, payment in account by First thing Friday morning.

:

I had one of those.

Problem was it was one Monday a month, and if you missed it because the client hadn't signed you had to wait until the next month.

tim

[BrowneIssue]

Problem was it was one Monday a month, and if you missed it because the client hadn't signed you had to wait until the next month.

Method Applications used to do that too.

You had to fill in and get signed weekly timesheets (which they used to invoice the clients).

Then you had to submit calendar month invoices against which they would pay you. The monthly invoices had to be supported by the weekly timesheets so the last few days of the invoice period were usually waiting on the week finishing so you could get a timesheet.

If the invoice wasn't with the agent on the first working day of the month, it got paid the next month - which was almost always the case.

I started a gig through them and saw no payment until about 10 weeks later. Since that was my first proper contract, I ended up begging loans from my family to see me through. Yet the agent had been receiving payments from the client from the second week.

Once I realised what the game was (effectively me factoring for them, dammit), I just withheld all the timesheets until I was ready to submit my invoice. That really pissed the agent off

[VectraMan]

My last agency was a 3 1/2 day turnaround - invoice in by lunchtime Monday, payment in account by First thing Friday morning.

Invoice by Tuesday lunchtime, money by Friday. Or invoice by Thursday lunchtime, money by Tuesday. Every week.

Obviously I have the best agent in the world. (ARM in Havant if you want to know).

[vetran]

Screw em down.

May be worth trying to cut their margin, part of the reason they charge 17%+ is to pay for factoring the money if they pay immediately, lengthening the payment terms changes the profitability so they should have a lower margin.

[Not So Wise]

Personally would not accept it from any agency unless it was 30 days on weekly invoice scale (aka max 5 weeks exposure) or I knew the agency was taking a very low margin (around 6% or less). And then in those two cases would have to think very seriously about. Agencies can and do go bust, very regularly.

28 days to be paid basically translates into 60 days from when work is done until payment from the agency, to then take normal margins on top of that is just ridiculous.

The only way agencies can justify to me their high margins throughout the entire length of a contract is via the provision of a factoring service. To accept them charging that rate and allowing them to get away with not providing the service is ...well dumb in my opinion

[rawly]

As we seem to be in a competition! PCR is a great agency for paying. They run a daily payroll, as they say it actually makes life easier for them rather than having a stampede to deal with once a week!

Typically I submitted Invoice by Noon Monday, and it was in the bank by Thursday. On one rare occasion it went in on Wednesday! So 2 Days is my record!

My impression is, once agencies get so big they then contract out their payroll, then expect 2 - 4 weeks. Whilst they are smaller, they seem to operate far more quicker, mainly as I expect they are doing it all internally themselves, and offer that extra bit of special service.

Advise then is to avoid the bigger and medium agencies if you are worried about pay timescales.