One of our clients hasn’t paid us. That happens sometimes. Sometimes they never pay you, sometimes they pay you late. Most of the time it doesn’t matter that much: after some early mistakes, we’ve learned not to put too many gross-revenue eggs in one client basket.
But this time it does matter: we finished our work with this company 6 months ago, and they still owe us $133,500 dollars. For anyone keeping track at home, that’s almost a full year’s salary at Apsis.
I’m not writing this to complain. I’m also not writing it to call them out by name (yet). Suffice to say this is a large company. It’s a company you’ve heard of. Multinational. Publicly traded. Hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap. I’m writing this because last week they sent me an email — or more precisely, an automated system sent me an email — and it made me laugh.
It’s the bureaucracy that gets me.1 It gets me every time. See, no one has indicated that they don’t want or won’t pay us — it’s just that the process is in the way. And in the meantime, while they try to find the right person somewhere in the world who can sign off on these invoices, there’s a computer chugging away, letting me know just how much money we’re still owed.
So why is this post titled Contract Clauses Matter? I’m glad you asked. See, our contract clearly states that payments must be made within 60 days of receipt of invoice. What it doesn’t do is outline what happens if payments are not made in a timely manner. At least, their contract doesn’t — our standard MSA does, but when you work with the really big companies, you use their language. Their language was mostly fine. We have a process for looking at contracts from our potential clients which flags things that we consider bad. What we don’t have (or didn’t have) is a formal process for identifying safeguards that a contract is missing.
So they owe us $130k, they know they owe us $130k, they’ve owed us $130k since June. Contractually they’re in breach. But it doesn’t matter, all we can do is sit here and keep waiting. After 10 years of contracting, you’d think we’d have learned not to make that mistake. But we haven’t. Well, hadn’t. Now we have.
Anyway, please pay us. We’re a small team, and floating a whole person’s salary2 for 6 months isn’t easy on our bank accounts.
p.s. If you’ve read this far and you’d like to not pay us for 6 months, drop us a line at contact@apsis.io. Or, if you’re interested in our contract management solution for how we actually address issues like this in practice, check out Ream.
Footnotes
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Do you recognize this email? If so, please help us get paid: reach out at contact@apsis.io. ↩
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We’ve been able to float this large balance this long because long ago we adopted policies which attempt to afford us 6+ months of operating runway. Contract work naturally leads to peaks and valleys in revenue, and we have tried to cater our business practices to smoothing revenue and optimizing for the long-term wherever possible. ↩