[stevage]

>Require half payment up front, or for longer projects, a milestone-sized payment up front. This will immediately eliminate all the clients who are allergic to writing checks, and I've never seen anybody serious reject this.

The one time I did this that was a mistake was for a university. It was dumb, and just delayed the whole project by 6 weeks while finance processed it. There was never any risk of the university not paying, so I shouldn't have bothered.

[ekidd]

Yup. Universities, government agencies and giant multinationals will all pay according to their standard vendor policies. This may be 3+ months after you submit the invoice in some cases. But most of these institutions will pay, so you just have to let them do their thing.

Basically, beyond a certain size, it's more trouble for an organization to cheat a vendor than it is for them to pay as agreed. Non-payment may require getting their lawyers involved, pulling in higher management, etc. (This is based on experience in the US. Things may be different elsewhere.)

[TomMarius]

Business with the government, religion and academic institutions IMO is a completely separate category.