News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you? by eigenvector on Friday February 20, 2015 @12:25AM (#9079082)
> Here repping enterprises, can confirm this is how things work. But we don't pay late out of malice. Often incompetence and apathy, sure, but we don't actively set out to cheat you guys.

Yep. Also, small companies dealing with MegaCorps - please, just accept our terms & conditions. Raise the price by 20% if you have to compensate for whatever rights you feel our standard T&C doesn't give you, I don't really care. But if you want your own terms, then your lawyers need to talk to our lawyers and there is a 50% chance that your PO will arrive after man lands on Mars.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you? by swombat on Friday February 20, 2015 @03:13AM (#9079479)
Helpfully, if you have raised the prices by even as little as 20%, you can easily use that extra margin to pay for an invoice factoring company who will pay you the invoice upfront - for a fee, but a fee that's usually much less than 20%.

Examples in the UK: https://marketinvoice.com/ http://www.platformblack.com/ or even http://granttree.co.uk itself (though we don't advertise this at the moment - our power-up fund does extend to invoice factoring for startups with no trading history).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you? by serverhorror on Friday February 20, 2015 @08:33AM (#9080299)
Nice I didn't even know such a thing existed...now off to find and try something that seems acceptable.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you? by ktsmith on Friday February 20, 2015 @01:31AM (#9079243)
More like raise the price by 200%. The number of overzealous indemnification clauses and other nonsense makes dealing with enterprise customers worth at least that much.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you? by kurtismorrison on Friday February 20, 2015 @09:12AM (#9080445)
Interesting point re: T&Cs because I often find that the PAPERWORK is the worst part of enterprise deals - not the time to get paid.

It's shocking how many big companies will send me book-length MSAs, T&Cs, etc and expect me to just sign it. A lot of them have some scary-sounding clauses in them.

It seems especially weird for a buyer of a SaaS product to have their own T&Cs.

Recently I was asked to sign a 30 page T&C doc from a potential customer - and I just said no. To my surprise, they said "ok no problem, we'll just use yours".

I tried this again with 2 other customers, and so far it's worked 2 out of 3 times. On the one that didn't, I'm still kind of in limbo - waiting for a PO nearly a month later... Based on your comment, it sounds like I'll be waiting a while :\

[ Parent | on HN ]