Hi Shawn I'm new to piano tuning but this is my 3rd small business. For my individual customers it's always pay on the spot. For institutional customers I expect 30 days as normal. Why? The person requesting my services needs to issue a requisition to the purchasing dept. to generate a purchase order, whether you ever see the purchase order or not. I won't make an appointment with an institution until I have a copy of the purchase order. Once the service is rendered I submit an invoice which they need to pass through their accounts payable dept. to authorize a cheque to be sent by some other office personnel. Because my invoice is not the only one they'll be dealing with in a given period, it will be processed with a bunch of others at a regular time which the AP dept. (which may also be the Accounts receivable and purchasing dept.) may have scheduled maybe twice or thrice a week among their other duties. Once all that is done the cheques are stuffed into envelopes and addressed by perhaps another person, and finally put into the mail basket for daily delivery to the post office. This can easily eat up the business week following their receipt of my invoice. Add a few more days in the mail, plus my preparing an invoice and mailing it to them takes up a few days. Receiving a cheque the third week following service rendered is not at all unusual when dealing with an organization rather than an individual. I have found that if I leave an invoice when the service is rendered, it's more likely to get lost, or left on someone's desk or otherwise delayed. I always mail an invoice, referenced to their purchase order. It's been my practice to ask the organization up front what payment interval is reasonable for them and then hold them to their word. For me, so far so good. I'm not excusing slow payers, but personally, I don't think it's reasonable to expect payment inside 14 days. Inside 30 days is quite reasonable. cheers, Phil Shawn Brock wrote: > List, > > I know we had a thread going not long ago on slow paying customers (snip) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090304/27836ac5/attachment.html>
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