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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?

#61
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…

aren't late fees the solution to this? I don't know exactly how you have to set it up in the signing contract, but if everyone's always paying you late then putting a "after 60 days a 20% late fee is applied" seems like a good way to either get paid or get more revenue (and in any case get your invoice taken seriously).

In college I was part of a junior enterprise (basically an outsourcing firm for students), and we figured out really quickly that the due date was the pay date after consistently applying late fee logic. Saved us a lot of back-and-forth.

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

#62
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?

We (enterprise buyers) would never agree to that. In all contracts I work on, there is a lengthy back and forth between lawyers working out the terms. Something like a premium fee if we are late on a net 30 payment would be a deal-killer. We know it takes a long time to process payments. I don't intentionally delay, nor am I encourage to delay - it is just that the wheels of SAP turn really slow.

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

#63
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here repping enterprises, can confirm this is how things work. But we don't pay late out of malice. Often incompetence and apathy, sure, but we don't actively set out to cheat you guys. We start our Net-X countdown clock at the very last moment, and typically that is when we start receiving the service (not when we agree to a deal). This seriously irks most vendors, but they seem to have been beaten down and conditio…

In the EU there is the better payments directive to handle exactly this problem; big companies dragging their feet with smaller suppliers. The law requires NET-30 unless otherwise specified and anything above NET-60 in a contract is normally considered unconscionable. Of course the big companies can fudge that by complaining about issues with supply or by querying amounts, not enough description of supplied services,…

So how does it work in reality? Do big companies violate these directives? Do the regulators fine them?

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

#64
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

I've found very few Enterprise customers comfortable with NET 30 terms. We're an interactive agency any deal we do is worth a considerable percentage of our annual income so we don't get too hung up on payment terms unless we're in a cash crunch. NET 30 is "nice" but if you can't do a deal because the terms are NET 60 instead of 30 then you need to figure out why cash is so low...

I've had 45/75 and once 90 day terms forced down my throat. That being said a lot of my clients who have really long payment cycles can be very flexible with us on billing milestones (like 50%+ up front - heck we've had 90% "down" in decembers).

These days all my invoices are done electronically and I have to be honest at least for us we don't often get bills more than a day or two late. I have however learned when we were smaller that generally if something was more than 4-5 days late something was off on the invoice being processed. I stopped giving folks leeway more than about 3 days before I started hounding folks. YMMV.

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

#66
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…

I typically bill a 3-year license on an order form in advance, which basically follows this procedure. It gets settled several months after invoice. For services, I provide a statement of work and an invoice.

Perhaps unexpectedly, I did 2% 10 Net 30 for gov't, and I was almost always paid on time.

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

#67

Bitcoin, overwhelmingly.

Enterprise customers? Please wake up from your wet dream.

Microsoft's data centers have been used for mining for over a year and its been used by internal teams to compensate people outside the company (working with open source vendors) and its a very convenient way to bypass the age old fight for money in the budget.

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

#68
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU there is the better payments directive to handle exactly this problem; big companies dragging their feet with smaller suppliers. The law requires NET-30 unless otherwise specified and anything above NET-60 in a contract is normally considered unconscionable. Of course the big companies can fudge that by complaining about issues with supply or by querying amounts, not enough description of supplied services,…

So how does it work in reality? Do big companies violate these directives? Do the regulators fine them?

The key phrase in his statement is "unless otherwise specified". Whenever an enterprise is dealing with a supplier -- and it doesn't matter whether it's software, electronic componentry, services, or anything else -- there is no such thing as an acceptable boilerplate contract or TOS... that is, unless the supplier is bigger than you and refuses to negotiate. Apple is notorious for bullying their suppliers for example, and Foxconn has gone so far as to purchase their own iron mine in order to control as much of their supply chain as possible. It typically takes 4-6 different groups (I feel like all this should be, and probably is documented somewhere... like every company's sales manual. You end up talking with the manager whose group requires the service/product, someone above or parallel to them as a sanity check, someone in the company's supplier management team, someone in the accounts payable org (to get your banking & credit details), someone in Legal to review contracts, a stamp of approval from one or multiple execs, and then finally whomever has to input the purchase request.) within an enterprise looking at it to get an approvable contract, and then another week or two to figure out whose signature it needs to have.

As long as money is flowing and there is no obvious abuse, no one really complains an regulators don't get involved. The wheels of commerce and all that.

Perhaps more apropos is the answer to a different version of your question, regarding a different EU directive: EU 95/46/ec (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...). This directive covers data protection and proscribes quite a few things that make licensing or operating SAAS services challenging in the EU. Some enterprises take the tack that "well, Safe Harbor covers us." and do whatever they want. Others are ultra-conservative and refuse to use SAAS services that aren't explicitly compliant with 95/46/EC. And, since it's a directive and not actually a law in any country (except perhaps maybe slightly Sweden... which is also quite a bizarre situation, having a FB data center there and all), it's clear as mud how it would actually be enforced, or what enforcement would look like.

To close, I will tell you that The Street looks very closely at the payables/receivables numbers & ratio, just like they care about inventory turns and other supply chain metrics. It's a big, and bad, deal when a large enterprise doesn't pay more slowly than they receive payment (in aggregate).

I could tell a lot of stories but that would be ... career limiting.

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

#69
post #47
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here repping enterprises, can confirm this is how things work. But we don't pay late out of malice. Often incompetence and apathy, sure, but we don't actively set out to cheat you guys. We start our Net-X countdown clock at the very last moment, and typically that is when we start receiving the service (not when we agree to a deal). This seriously irks most vendors, but they seem to have been beaten down and conditio…

Interesting. Thanks for the insight in to your world :)

Happy to share. :)

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

#70
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering about this! Has anyone tried it? I know in my industry (pharma) we offer "prompt pay" discounts to our customers. 2% 30 net 60 for example (payment due in 60 days, get 2% off is paid in 30). Of course a huge corporate has a lot more leverage with regards to terms than a small contractor.

How does that work? Do you send out the first invoice at 98% cost, wait 30 days, and send a second 2% invoice if the payment still isn't there?

Good question! With a lot of our discounts we do a chargeback. That is, they pay 100%, then we send them the 2%. Not sure if the prompt pay discount works that way though.
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