Who can I trust ? credit check or not?

[BrilloPad]

1 year

AtW

Aren't you worried that when atw returns he will tell you what he thinks of you! I am s**tting myself - he might set his squirrels on me!

I never have more than 1 invoice outstanding at a time...

[NickFitz]

So you'd still need to limit your exposure to two weeks of invoicing.

1 year

AtW

[Gonzo]

Hi

My first post so please be nice ...

You haven't been looking at these boards long then.

Being nice to newbies is not the done thing if they ask to be spoon-fed answers to basic questions that reading the first timer guides would provide answers to.

In this case though,

I have been contracting for quite a while and never worried about an agent going bust on me. Bur guess what, yup it happened. I lost some money when Futuro went down the tubes. I changed agents to Computer people and just went on with my contract. But now I am looking for my next one I am a bit paranoid about these agents I have never heard of.

So what do you guys do to see if an agent will survive until pay day ? Do you credit check or not? If you do how ? If not then what ?

Cheers

Max

You can credit check the agency, you get a discount for Checksure.biz if you are in the PCG. The Keep it Live option (about £15 without PCG discount) allows you to refresh the report as often as you want for a year. And don't just go by the raw rating. Have a think about what all the changes to the company information could mean - changes to the Directors, companies taking a charge over the assets of the agency etc.

However, this will only give you an early warning that there might be trouble ahead. Contractually you will probably have to hand over signed timesheets to the agent, at which point your time belongs to them to invoice for.

Once in a contract the only way I can think of to minimise your risk is to ensure that the amount of money that they owe your company is as low as possible.

If they allow weekly invoicing, great.

If they owe too much at any one time I would not hand over any future timesheets until they get more up to date with payments.

I invoice monthly, Agency's payment terms are 28 days after invoice. I get twitchy if they are late, which is why I keep an eye on the "Keep it Live" report.

It hasn't happened, but I would not send a further invoice and timesheet if there were two previous ones unpaid at the time. Once you have submitted the timesheet and invoice, your Co becomes a creditor.

If they go under and you haven't submitted the timesheet then you may still have some leeway about how the end client gets billed for that time. The liquidator of the agency might not agree though.

[PAH]

PCGPlus gets you up to £5K of insurance if an agent goes bust.

So you'd still need to limit your exposure to two weeks of invoicing.

Oh how I miss those days.

[VectraMan]

PCGPlus gets you up to £5K of insurance if an agent goes bust.

[PAH]

Check if your agent can do more frequent payments than monthly.

Last one I was with did weekly bacs runs, though they kept nagging me to only submit monthly invoices. I settled for fortnightly, to minimise both exposure to risk and paperwork.

[MaxDam]

Hi

My first post so please be nice ...

I have been contracting for quite a while and never worried about an agent going bust on me. Bur guess what, yup it happened. I lost some money when Futuro went down the tubes. I changed agents to Computer people and just went on with my contract. But now I am looking for my next one I am a bit paranoid about these agents I have never heard of.

So what do you guys do to see if an agent will survive until pay day ? Do you credit check or not? If you do how ? If not then what ?

Cheers

Max