Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you?

#121

Post by uptownJimmy » Sat, Feb 21, 2015, 4:19 PM UTC

eitally wrote: post #116

uptownJimmy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot bring myself to upvote this wonderfully informative post.

You don't have to upvote it, but if you ever want to chat about this kind of stuff, shoot me an email. I'm happy to answer questions and offer advice.

I find myself working for a startup enterprise consultancy as my first employer now that I've changed careers and entered software development. One of the primary factors in our success as a company is down to just getting paid, which is not usually an intractable problem, but it is a thing to reckon with. I don't handle that part of the business, but the realities of corporate AP/AR have come close to shutting us down as we endured some lean months there in the first year. Meanwhile, our corporate clients keep chugging along...

Re: Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you?

#122

Post by vessenes » Sat, Feb 21, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24

patio11 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customer believes that it paid NET 30 ("You received the check within 30 days of us deciding to send you a check. NET 30!") and that I can speak to Legal if I want to press the issue, which (naturally) I don't. As near as I can tell, this is just priced into everyone's expectations.

Do you ever consider charging more as a premium for the delay?

One of my companies sold to hospitals. They are the WORST with payables. Unbelievably bad. It was terrible. We eventually were coached by a very friendly client who had pity on us.

We ended up raising prices something like 30% and offering discount terms like 15 day 30% discount.

They never once paid on time for the discount, although we would sometimes get paid in 30 days at the higher rate. (Typical pay rates at the time were Net-180 to Net-270).

So, price it up, and show it as a discount. A good customer inside an enterprise should be sympathetic; if you're good, you can turn it into you and your customer against the customer's payables department. You can say "tell me the real story on payables", and "I have to get paid faster than that or I need more cash than we talked about" to many of them.

Re: Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you?

#123

Post by ryanelkins » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 6:37 PM UTC

Every customer of mine pays through a bank transfer.

Some pay monthly, some pay the full contract upfront. We offer a discount for those that pay upfront so it's the customer's choice.

Most of our customers pay within 15-30 days. Our invoice says Net15 but some customers insist on different terms. It's just another negotiation point for us. Often the company policy is something like Net60 and the people we are talking to can't change that.

Whatever the terms end up being, some customers are really good about sticking to them, and some aren't. Sometimes a customer doesn't pay for 2-3 months and then we get a deposit for all those payments lumped up at once.

In almost all cases, the people making the payments have no relation to the people who bought your product. They most likely don't even know them or even work in the same state (or country). The bigger the company the more likely this is.

Once you've worked with a particular customer for a while you at least have a good idea of how they pay.