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Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you?

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

#12
Overwhelmingly: Send a quote for the upcoming year, get a PO number corresponding to the quote, send an invoice referencing the PO number, wait an interminable amount of time, a check magically appears in the mail.

The last one was 9 months late in paying. Enterprise life, yay.

Salient point to keep in mind: the people responsible for everything that happened in that workflow after my customer passed the quote to her purchasing department are a) not my customer, b) not even on the same campus as my customer, and c) just. don't. care. A six figure check is just another piece of paper to them, which they'll see several hundred of this week.

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

#15
post #8
post #3

Let define "enterprise customer" first. This is someone for whom the terms, conditions and prices of your website do not apply. Enterprise customer = Ask for quotes. So you might delay the question of how they pay you, once you have an enterprise customer ready to sign. An other distinction is, that you might charge accounts of normal customers, but you always just send an invoice to an enterprise customer, and they…

> My trick of getting the money fast is to offer 2% discount, if they pay within 7 days. Great tactic. The reason this works, in some cases, is NOT because the company cares about a measly 2% of whatever they're paying, but because they may have a policy that says they _must_ accept discounts if available.

You know you're dealing with a very enterprise customer when they automatically give a discount of this nature to themselves when you bill them using their own billing system (I seem to recall MS's vendor system does this).

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

#17
post #12

Overwhelmingly: Send a quote for the upcoming year, get a PO number corresponding to the quote, send an invoice referencing the PO number, wait an interminable amount of time, a check magically appears in the mail. The last one was 9 months late in paying. Enterprise life, yay. Salient point to keep in mind: the people responsible for everything that happened in that workflow after my customer passed the quote to her…

NET 30 baby

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

#20
post #12

Overwhelmingly: Send a quote for the upcoming year, get a PO number corresponding to the quote, send an invoice referencing the PO number, wait an interminable amount of time, a check magically appears in the mail. The last one was 9 months late in paying. Enterprise life, yay. Salient point to keep in mind: the people responsible for everything that happened in that workflow after my customer passed the quote to her…

NET 30 baby

Given that @patio11 can have "late" checks, I presume there's already such a thing in place. The problem is what you do when they let 30 days fly by. Many of the recourses available to you aren't worth the risk of losing the client by being a hard-ass.
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