When doing work for a large company or institution, the first thing you must do is obtain an order number. Large companies usually have or should have an order book or requisition book. No order or requisition number, no work. It is in the large company that a small invoice tends to get lost or delayed because the clerks handling it may not have a reference for it. In your own invoice if the order number is a reference, they will immediately know who needs to authorize the payment. Three months is not an unusually long time to receive payment; some supermarket chains delay their payments "deliberately" for 6 months. Occasionally I used to tune pianos on board cruise liners and the shipping agents only paid after 3 months, their excuse being when I quizzed them about it is that they were still awaiting payment from the tour operator or ship owners. Wim, you have got to get yourself into a stable financial position to be able to buffer yourself against the odd late paying customer; fretting over it just isn't worth the miserable amounts sometimes involved. You probably spent more time on chasing the payment than what you spent doing the original job. AF -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091028/6fae5c58/attachment.htm>
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