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	Subject - Slow payers Ryan I was wondering how much intrest you guys charge your slow paying customers, and when to start charging interest zol_man of course try to get the money right away if you can, at the time of completion. how large of a balance are you holding for him? i was charging 1.5% a month for a balance of 5000. John A. Peters If you are working for a general, good luck. Maybe it will work, but for the rest of the clients if you provide a payment schedule as a part of the contract, they will happily follow it. I have found that charging interest is fine, in your small type terms, but in practice it does not work any better than the lien law which also does not work like you would hope. A.Q. and I will explain and send a copy of my terms that cover this, that I got when I bought Brookline. kbsparky For the most part, all of my customers are good pay, except for one. That one needs to be "baby-sat" to pay their bills. We charge them 2% per month, and those terms are spelled out on every invoice submitted. Here is how it works: Suppose the invoice is marked "NET 15 days" -- that gives them just over 2 weeks to pay "on time". From there, we allow 30 more days to pay before assessing any service charges. So, they really have over 6 weeks to pay before any sort of late charges are added, sometimes longer, as we only send out service charge invoices on the 1st day of the month. Which will happen tomorrow, as they have 2 unpaid invoices from December. Their status as our "customer" is in jeapordy right now, due to the amount of time they are taking to pay off those last 2 invoices. We won't perform any more work until those are paid in full, as well as the service charges. Last year, they paid us over $500 in service charges. Wirenutz my collection agency says posting 1.5%mo~18% annum on billheads has resulted in awards of more % that the original sums in many cases other than that avenue, leave something undone or unmade, keep the $$$ ahead of the job where slackers are suspect, and learn to simply look some in the eye and say 'pay slow, get slow' ~W~ John A. Peters There may be another side to this. 2% a month is 24% a year. Actually it is more if it is compounded. If he always pays (eventually), then it is not so bad. If you don't NEED him as a customer, try 2% discount for payment with in ten days, and net on receipt of invoice with interest (service charge) starting after 30 days. However some companies are setup in a way that it just seems that it takes a while for the proper persons to sign off on the invoices. Obviously this company is not trying to save money since they pay you so much interest. I suggest you find out what steps they go through and what time lines they use. In the past I have found companies that batch process all the invoices once a month or maybe every 15 days. In that case you need to know the cutoff date. Do they wait for the big boss to come in twice a month and sign off, or what? When you find out these things you can manage better.