Why customers do not want to pay?

Unfortunately, today's realities are such that the customer of work on information technologies is trying in every way not to pay for the work (perhaps this is due to a frivolous attitude to IT employees or for other reasons). Perhaps the topic was raised more than once, but I just have to make a contribution to the development of the issue.



In this article, I will try not to hurt anyone, and in any case do not equate all customers to the league of unscrupulous customers. So what is really the matter:

')

1. That client who pays for the result to improve the business.

2. That client who does not see options to circumvent you in the procedural or legal terms pays.

3. That client who pays in advance understands that he has money for these works, although there is a possibility of applying paragraph 2.



All others prefer not to pay and it becomes a problem.



On one of the first projects, the 1C programmer asked me, and how is the client going to take work?



Indeed, the client did not have full-time IT specialists and, in fact, they didn’t have any understanding what they really needed. And it will be problematic to pass them about 300 hours of improvements, not in terms of the final functionality, namely, the justification for our labor costs. Due to the premonition of questions, I decided to split the payments into small parts and give a schematic report for each one, once we have achieved a certain result.



The work went and everything was super, there were minor improvements (5 - 12 hours) and we moved to the goal, but unexpectedly for them there was an unbearable barrier, namely, the passed stage at 72 hours, here it began. The invoice was issued + the act and went to pay the customer, a week went by, the second went, well, there are delays what to do. He paid the programmer out of his own and continued to wait, the client seemed to be reliable. Everything went on until they stopped taking the phone. Under the contract, at the request of the client, there was a gap, namely the absence of the deadlines for which the customer had to accept the work. Accordingly, the problem (shortcoming, concession, stupidity) is mine; they can sign an act for at least a year.



As a result, the work was still paid, because the client simply counted the amounts already invested, compared them with the amounts on debts, apparently also conducted an analysis of the cost of the audit, well, in general, everything ended well.



What I lead to, you can give concessions to customers, but all concessions must be weighed, taking into account the worst developments for you. Personally, I sometimes find it difficult to grasp the decency of a client by spending less than three meetings with him. The fact is that during negotiations it is required to set various options for the development of events and voice all possible amounts and watch the reaction of the customer, but always consider for yourself the worst option. Will be better? So everything is fine and the world is not so bad, but if you miscalculate, then alas, only you will have to solve problems.



For myself, I revealed several rules, following which I avoid possible problems with payments:



1. The contract - should be yours and only yours, because the client is usually interested only in terms and cost. In no case do not agree to sign the contract form "which the client uses just for such cases"

1.1. Deadlines - the deadlines should be adequate, not the ones that the client assigns (discussed separately), namely, that you would have time to do all the work and leave time for force majeure.

1.2. Payment schedule - it is necessary, it is necessary, the advance is not as important as a strictly calculated schedule of receipt of funds. It should be tied to the final results of each subsequent stage, but in no case should there be large gaps during the passage of which you will receive full functionality and the ability of the customer to transfer the work to another or freeze the project.

1.3. Take into account the right to transfer access to information systems - allows you to exclude situations when you are developing at the same time as full-time specialists and at some point you can unknowingly transfer all the material to them. Accordingly, this does not apply to projects that are worked out by a team of specialists, this is a separate story.

1.4. Penalties - because working with large companies that have lawyers in their staff or even worse lawyers is extremely inconvenient to sue. In order not to sue you can freeze the project and wait for either the customer’s insights (90%) or the accumulation of penalties in order to cover your own costs (10%) *



* Percentages are given as an approximate ratio and do not have official statistics.



2. Insurance - in fact, those works that are not paid to you are the result of your work (you need to specify in the contract) and, accordingly, can be stored anywhere (your hosting, NFS to client servers, etc.). In this regard, you can transfer to the client the result of your work only after signing intermediate or final acts (it is required to be specified in the contract)



3. People - you need to be confident in the specialists you work with, recruitment is the most important part of the process. And in no case do not give the contacts directly to the customer, this will allow you to sleep at night (checked)



Well, in conclusion I want to say that you always need to communicate honestly with clients and voice the conditions of your work completely. In no case do not password system or anything else like that, your work should be open and only in this case customers will cooperate with you. And as for payments, nobody wants to pay, convince them in the comments.