Befuddlement...

[alexpgp]

One thing that I simply do not understand are companies that exhibit no flexibility when it comes to small invoices. It's one thing to hold off payment for 30 days for a sum that, in turn, may take that long to get from somewhere else to the client, quite another to insist on 30 days (or longer) for a $40 job.

As it turns out, it would appear I'm going to have to light a fire under a client who has conveniently "forgotten" to pay for two such jobs.

Cheers...

Comments

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

Next step: after the "fair warning," do not take anymore jobs from this slacker!

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

That goes without saying.

The breadth and depth of ways to screw over freelancers never ceases to amaze me. Besides the trusty "just don't pay 'em" scam, a number of what turn out to be short-lived companies start with the idea of asking 100 separate translators to translate a sample "page" (for free, natch), except that none of the samples are the same page, but consecutive pages from a 100-page document. The results are generally mind-bogglingly incompetent.

Ah, well... live and learn!

[agirlnamedluna.livejournal.com]

Ah, I feel you. I work for a large company, it's on and off work as that usually goes with freelancing. Sometimes they send me 5 pages, sometimes 5 lines. I was prompted by a rather snippy mail to ask for a purchase order number immediately after every translation request, because it would allow them to have an overview of how much the translations cost. Fair enough. They pay only after 2 months, despite the legal 1 month term which is also specified in my invoices. I need to make a separate invoice for every purchase order. And now I recently received an email requesting I stop asking for a purchase order number after every job, and rather tally the amounts, because it's a lot of work for them. The bigger the client, the bigger the annoyances it seems.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

I sort of had the same experience with the accounting department of this one client. They established a policy that insisted I create a separate invoice for each job.

This would not be much of a problem if the issue was a couple of jobs a month, but the actual work load was something like about 10 jobs, generally done in rapid succession. To add insult to injury, I could not wield my "minimum charge" as a countermeasure, because all their jobs exceeded my minimum charge (not to mention the client is too good to risk ticking off).

After about two months of this, a new policy went into effect, scrapping the old. I found out later the accounting department was feeling overworked. Something about too much paperwork. :^)

You doing much writing these days (other than for paying clients)?

Cheers...

[agirlnamedluna.livejournal.com]

yes, that's what happened her, they were overworked due to their own policies. The company was too big to piss them off as well, but I did snicker when I got that mail.

Not doing much writing if any at all, atm. I haven't written in a LONG while actually, except the intro to oberonia's book Bayou L'Abeille which you may know from Idol ^^