That's a great tip! A friend did a huge 8 year residential project... He saw the liability involved, and started documenting all his communications meetings and times and dates etc... Sure enough the builder screwed up, and didn't put conduit pulls in a few critical locations, and he tried to blame my friend... who pulled out his book that showed the conversations they had and dates regarding the counduits runs... (Saved his ass)...
I just did the same on a job with a real nutcase... started printing out all his emails, and nade notes of our conversations, etc.. The time you spend on this can be well worth it, although it seems like a pain... Sure enough with this nutcase, I've had to pull out my notes a couple of times...

Hi Bob, sorry to hear about your problems. 4,000.00 is allot of money. I'm a really easy going guy, and go way out of my way for my customers, but when it comes to getting my money, I don't play around.
Knock on wood, my worst case scenerio has been waiting 4 months to get paid, but I was adding late fees. I did get my money plus my late fees. Every once in a while, I will commit a couple of hours to making phone calls to past due accounts. that seems to work. Along with the occational collections letter that I generate from quickbooks.
If you want to give me his address, I'll go break his legs for you..LOL..
Hope all works out.
Bobby....

Instead of giving him a discount, go the other way.
On our invoices, our payment terms are "due upon reciept". A good way to get the ball rolling on someone who is slow paying is to re-submit the invoice with a 10-20% late payment fee added on. When they call(and they will), explain that they received their bill and are now 30 days late. Make sure that it explains that the fee is added every 30 days like the power company, phone company, credit card companies, etc. If they complain about some minor item which you have done your best to fix, ask if they don't pay thier cell phoen bill due to a dropped call, or whether they don't pay the power company when there is an outage. Let them know that you will continue to do everything in your ability to make them happy, but your accounting system adds late payments when people are late, just like every one else.

Jason

take a bottle of brake fluid and dump it on his big fancy car....after a few hours the paint will peel right off....... yeah i know you wont get paid but it will cost a mint for his car to be repainted

As part of the On macro send an off command to the outlet, on command to the outlet and power command to the sat. Sat will always be on.

I had a customer that I honestly believe just simply forgot to submit payment on the pre-wire. I happened to be in the area and stopped by the house. The customer was there.

He didn't have his checkbook, but he felt bad about it so he dug around in his car for about 8 minutes and came back with a $700 cash down payment....

Late fees sound like a good idea. I have not done any late fees mainly because I don't know what the rules are, I seem to recall that there are limits, be careful.

Due upon receipt = Net Now!

I have heard the same from many others. I had a difficult customer a while ago who kept coming up with the most assinine reasons not to pay his bill. We finally came to an agreement that I would finish off a punch list of tweaks to get paid.

I showed up on time and dutifully went to work. The a**hole slipped out of the house as I was in the theater and his wife played the I don't have the checkbook routine, this is between you and my husband. I said fine, let me finish a few last things. I knew they both were clueless on operations because trainings were like Attention Deficit Disorder Theater with the both of them. I went to the theater a triple thumbed up Telletubies and Joy of Painting on the Tivo, in the Master Bed Tivo Night Calls and other Playboy shows. You can erase them all you want but they keep coming back.....I got paid a couple weeks later.

And not to be a dick, but I would never have a job even close to complete with $4K hanging. Especially if I had misgivings about the customer....that is what your gut is for.

I've only had one client try to side-step his final payment.

My gut feeling was that he overspent furnishing his house!

His biggest 'problem'(or so he said) was that he couldn't operate his theater!

He was always around, from the prewire to the NEAR completion.He alway's seemed like a good guy and I thought we got along great!

He dissapeared about the time I was ready to show him how to operate everything!

After multiple attempts to meet him for instructions, I finally caught him at home late one night(after business hours).

At the front door, I explained that I felt really bad that he had an excellent system and that I realy wanted him to be able to enjoy it.

He let me in, we went to the theater room, I calmly told him....

"Press DVD to watch DVD, press SAT to watch satellite, etc,etc."

He paid the next day!!!!(two months late)

If he would have acted like Tony Sopprano?

Put a couple of caps in his a**!

That'll learn 'im!! ;-)

4k covers a lot of bills!

Try to be nice and hopefully it will make him feel guilty.

I hate to involve lawyers.

One lawyer in a small town will starve; TWO lawyers in the same small town will get filthy RICH!!!

And you'll still be out 4k plus!

In retrospect; put a cap in his a**!

As a precaution; wear gloves, don't spit(dna!) and have a good aliby ;-)

Don't any of you have a "cost-of-collection" clause in your contract???

Yes, his name is Tony. It states that I will hand the account over to someone named Tony and Tony will decide the cost of collection.

I hope you all don’t mind, I am not in CI business but never the less in our business we have one or two special customer a year. It is amazing how some of your experiences are exactly like mine.

i.e. customer ask how much work I have to do and then sneaks out behind my back without payment and the poor little wife doesn't have a checkbook or amazingly not even a freaking credit card.

Or the customer decides after everything is done, complete/finished he wants to renegotiate the signed completed contract.

Or he wants more things/services for the same price of the original contract and refuses to pay until he gets what he wants.

I have not seen mentioned, where the customer threatens to sue you, bankrupt you, call his personal friend lawyer, call the chamber of commerce or better business bureau to file a complaint and destroy your business reputation. When I get done with you, you’ll be finished.

Here is one more,

After the customer sneaking out behind me I had no choice but to leave the invoice on the counter. Yeah, the dude left me inside his house by myself. I mailed him a 15, 30, 45, 60 day notice, left many voice mail never received payment. Until this past week a thunderstorm rolled in a cold front and tripped a cricuit breaker he wanted he system fixed by the same evening and if I did additional work and gave him more inventory for free he would give me the check that was due Dec 16, 2005. Until then he was going to hold the check in ransom.

That's freakin' awesome. ceied, you never fail with top notch advice! I don't know that I would have the guts but, I'd certainly fantasize about the client seeing it the first time.