[rebelidealist]

Letting the client fuck you over by not paying is being a chump consultant?

Would clients delay payment for their attorney? How are tech consultants any different?

The demand for tech consultant is more than supply. You don't need any clients that are scared of working with you because you call out another client for not payment. There are plenty of work in the sea to put up with this.

[napoleond]

> Would clients delay payment for their attorney?

Yes, routinely! That's what Thomas and Patrick are getting at. For better or worse (and trust me, I've felt the "worse" side of it lately+) companies will, for a plethora of boring and stupid reasons, not always get their payables out on time. It's completely normal. They're not trying to screw you. It just happens. You can choose not to work with those companies, or to expend your energy toward making sure your clients always pay you right away, but that's a poor use of your time as a consultant.

What you should do instead is: (a) charge more and (b) consider adding interest on late payments. Lawyers and accountants do that, and then they don't really care if you're late paying because they've been charging you favourable (to them) interest.

+ I'm in the process of spinning down the consultant thing and getting a "normal" job again for a while, largely because of cash flow errors. It was one of several hard lessons learned, but that's partly why I bothered to comment: it's not realistic to expect good clients to change the way they do business for you, so you need to understand, accept, and plan for the reality of stuff like delayed payment.

[tptacek]

I don't know if the "late payments" thing works for anyone else, but speaking from my own limited experience: it's better to take any given business concern out of your client's hide in increased rate than to add any complexity to contracts.

To a one, the most lucrative clients all have contracts reviewed by house counsel, and many have purchasing departments trained to do nothing but review contracts. Anything remotely complicated you put in a contract is (a) going to get stripped out and (b) potentially going to add weeks to the amount of time it takes to get a master agreement in place; more than once, a few weeks delay in legal was all it took for the window of opportunity for a contract to pass.

At any rate: you are exactly right. Have you ever seen a thread where Patrick, me, or some other established consultant harangued HN about raising their rates, and about not setting rates based on some double-digit-percentage uplift of what their last full-time job was? This is why.

[napoleond]

It might be a regional thing; every independent professional I've ever hired has done something like "Net 30; 1.5% interest per month on late invoices" so businesses here are used to it. I've never tried it myself (benefit is marginal compared to just raising rates, as you say, plus it's a PITA to actually enforce) but I don't think it would have presented any problems in legal. YMMV, obviously :)

[tptacek]

Yes, clients will delay payments for their attorneys. I accidentally did that to mine after we sold our chump consultancy. For like, 5 months! Guess how upset my attorney was?

For that matter: guess what my chump consultancy does? You can click my profile and find my company pretty easily. How safe does it sound to stiff us on payments? And yet it happens all the time, to everyone, because that's how business works. It's why big consultancies have people in charge of invoicing, rev rec, and receivables.