Pricing | Quotes | Bookkeeping Records and Tax Audits | Onsite Visit Costs Absorbed | Bad Debts | Timesheet and Specification Hell | Independent Infrastructure | Cutting Losses Improves Profits | Time Payment for Large Debts | Self-Service Billing Downloads | Country Business | Working Outside | Research on Bad Debtors in NSW
Many small businesses seem to lurch from one disaster to another (reactive instead of proactive management). We often are called up to redevelop their existing site or technical infrastructure to bail them out before they go under. Often the previous developer was unqualified and left a complete mess to recover from.
We use our project management system to stay viable. Often management is pathetic at the small business and we have to counter this downward spiral by our own robust internal management systems. We have built up these methods and tools to cope with the pressure from little guys who stuff things up so much and won't pay to upgrade or improve. Even some middle-sized companies act like they are a small business with limited resources so this applies to them also.
The usual symptom is penny-pinching on IT resources, trying to cut corners for no good reason and endless delays to save paying us on time and reduce our cashflow and give them an interest free loan. No-one thinks ahead or budgets for the future. Everything is now and for themselves not their colleague - very introverted mind-set.
They suck our resources to survive so we have to fight them off bravely before we are sucked down in the whirlpool of their incompetency with them. Often we end up losing money despite our best efforts. Small businesses are very difficult to make a dollar out of. The best option is to boot them out when they are too much trouble to service. So we have an exit strategy for the worst ones.
In June 2006, the project management information system was extended grudgingly to kicking along the client's pathetic bookkeeping by allowing downloading of just their balance owing, invoices and receipts, quotes and quote amendments and bank memos from our records. This is a unique and unheard of service due to slack bookkeeping of the customer which put much pressure on our cashflow and admin time and effort. This overhead has pushed the project ahead where the customer would not do their duty and keep tight records and see what the project was costing or what the next bill was. It is on demand and has low costs so we are not hammered for backcopies which is not our duty to provide. It is to combat the kind of customer who has no records on their site due to constantly losing emails due to viruses and spam, failing to file important documents and is in danger of going under if they kept up their slack record keeping practices which would endanger payment to us for services done. The final outcome is a quicker, less loss creating project that allows us to finish and cut our losses with this red-ink and debt-producing lemon of a customer.
In February 2007, the poor record keeping of the customer led to an ATO tax audit of them. This proves if a customer has poor record keeping, they will be caught by the ATO for a tax audit, possible prosecution for tax evasion and a complete overhaul of their shoddy record keeping which may send them broke through all the lost time serving the ATO's requests.
For the record, our system above of allowing a customer to download copies of tax invoices, receipts and bank records securely from our Website produced records that were not useful enough or too complex or hard to understand for the ATO tax audit, so a waste of time. They want accountant quality records, not our inhouse records. As usual the government adds costs to small businesses that are of little benefit to us. We just had to give a statement of total amount owing and paid by the customer.
As of May 2007, we have absorbed onsite visit costs as it is worth us to travel a long way to get a job going rather than sit back and see cashflow go negative. We also now have places to work from in Wellington and Sydney to facilitate onsite work in these areas and use local central accommodation for most major cities across Australia to be efficient and on the ball.
This also stops customers stuffing us around because their usual technical support person is too busy to get back to us or they are struggling to get the basic technology going to say upload an image from a digital camera to a PC via a USB cable but have never done it before and won't try because they might make a mistake. We can do the technical support ourselves at our own cost, an investment in our business we can write off against increased income. We do this because of the customer's inadequacies but win as we get much better value with better infrastructure setup by ourselves pronto.
We have used an office in Wetherill Park, Sydney, when we did a short job in Sydney. This is also unheard of - us paying for the travel and basic support - but it gives us an edge over other companies that try to frustrate us. If a town frustrates us, we find other places to do business. That way we are not bogged down by slow payers or stuffy locals.
We run a dynamic mobile company so can do this quite easily now. We picked skills up by travelling for 2 years during the dot com crash and are totally Web-based now. It also gets us out of Orange which can be a trying town at times due to its conservative nature and tightwad locals and gives us a fresh slant on life and alternative income streams than just working over the Internet from Orange. In January 2008, we left Orange when things became too difficult to continue there.
In June 2007, we decided to write-off incomplete work for a NSW bad debtor and give the customer a discount for getting us to write a project management system for a job that was taking too long to pay and holding us back. Our equipment started failing due to low cashflow not allowing us to invest in new equipment so we realised if we lost the income in the short-term we would survive in the long-term by finding better work elsewhere with better customers or a new job altogether if we closed down and gave up in frustration.
We did a 2 month job as a PHP developer in early 2008 in Brisbane which replenished our finances a little. We started to run our business from Brisbane but ended up travelling around NSW and ACT. Our direction is to move around NSW and get our finances square again. NSW is costly to do business but it has more dynamic than Queensland in the short-term. NSW has lost us too much money for what we make from it but has more infrastructure as we juggle things to get our business going again. Queensland is better value for small businesses like ours but takes a while to get going in the IT sphere compared to NSW.
Giving up in early 2008 to escape the downward tug of NSW customers and moving our business office to Queensland in 2008 to make a new start was a tough decision but a rebirth is sometimes necessary to get on in life, not just hounding bad debtors or running around after over-busy people. Every type of customer has difficult moments. Scientists don't pay as much or pay enough and can be prone to controversial beliefs which can blow agreements up at short notice. Slack non-technical businesses always drive up debt and delay payment due to poor management internally. Both cause financial damage to suppliers.
For one NSW long-term bad-debtor, credit was given for unfinished work and the bill finalised in December 2007 then later in January 2008 when they would only pay about 50% of the lower fee - making it about 25% of my costs overall - a dead loss. Completed software was billed. We did not give away our software but to close the bill gave a large discount for getting us to write a very useful project management system or the customer would have held us to ransom in NSW waiting for payment and destroying our finances as they seem really good at doing in NSW with their slack financial management. Our survival came first and after we had survived we got our act together and caught up our bills and sorted them out with debtors.
We got more out of writing the project management system than the actual job itself!
Money can kill you if you love it too much. It is like weeds that strangle your life away.
If a company keeps changing their specification endlessly and gets work done they don't want and then won't pay for when we calculate the hours on our timesheets, we find alternative income streams for a while till things pick up again. Accurate pricing blocks rorting.
The more changes are made, the more the costs blowout and the more risk on the developer to keep costs down! Hence we resist changes to specifications and draw a line in the sand to stop customers crippling the project by messing around with specifications. We stick to the original specifications and ony accept changes if they are viable to implement - no rush jobs and no last minute thoughts which clobber the job and make it run over budget and lose us tons of money. The customer only sees things as an end user and does not see them as a full system like we do as software engineers hence their little change can balloon into a cascading string of changes that blow costs out.
We clamp down on changes to keep costs in check.
If somehow the customer still sneaks through changes or our billing cycle gets longer and longer due to complexity in the project making billing go to the bottom of the pile, the escalating costs can be a shock to the customer.
So, do not crowd the developer - the more changes you cram in, the less likely he is to do a regular bill and the more likely you are to get a big shocking bill which you won't want to pay. Timesheets must be done regularly or a big bill will hit the customer. The more interruptions and changes the less likely the timesheets will be done and the more likely of a cost blowout.
There are running battles between the developer needing to get timesheets entered for billing and the customer trying to make specification changes.
We resist such pressure on our business and give priority to timesheets despite what evidence of payment owing they produce - bad or good. The truth of actual hours spent is necessary so we can plan better next time. The worst that can happen is they don't pay the last bill or they pay 5 months late but it stops the rot - a high price to pay but worth it to save your business from destruction if no information is gathered and drastic surgery taken to kick the blood-suckers off.
There are a lot of non-technical companies that have no idea about the cost of software development and will try to cut corners or not pay to save their hide when they shouldn't try to build custom software as it will end in a wreck like seems to happen very often to us when they ask us to develop custom software for them on a shoestring budget.
Ignorance of hi-tech methodology and costs by the customer is a killer for our hi-tech business and must be blocked at all costs. The quicker we can abort when costs blow out the better so regular use of metrics on progress and costs is vital to survive in this cutthroat environment of ridiculous expectations of small businesses who try to live off us and not pay for what they want. It takes us 6 to 12 months or even 2 years to recover from these losses. Every time someone rips us off it takes a very long time to recover and get going again. The less the rip-off the quicker we can recover. So if we are smart, they are less able to hurt us.
Yes this is an adversarial way of treating customers but customers like this are an enemy to fight off. There is evil in the world, one of them being greed and greed can drive a company to destroy another for their own benefit so we have to use the armour of God to protect us (Ephesians 6). Many times we don't win but have to start again and find other customers rather than go to court and be strung out with delays and costs to the point of wiping us out. Bad customers are very slick at avoiding paying and exploiting every loophole they can lay their hands on so beware and run the other way when they try to get you to quote for them. They are like the plague.
This is the technique used by many bad customers who use bad debt to destroy our business:
One upside can be if challenged a customer can pay but pay late or we can come to some agreement with the customer to have them pay part of the original bill and give them a discount or credit for work not completed by us to close off a long overdue bill.
Here is a very relevant verse God gave me when my equipment failed when a large bad debt ground us down to the point of writing the customer off in June 2007 - you catch up and bill them but they won't pay in full but drag it out so your equipment crashes while waiting for them so that it is very hard to bill them and you write them off letting them get off without paying rather than suffer even more losses - a complete rort and disaster:
'My son, if you have put up security for your neighbour, if you have struck hands in pledge for another, if you have been trapped in what you said, ensnared by the words of your mouth, then do this, my son, to free yourself, since you have fallen into your neighbour's hands: Go and humble yourself; press your plea with your neighbour! Allow no sleep to your eyes, no slumber to your eyelids. Free yourself, like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler.' (Proverbs 6:1-5)
We learned a long time ago to have independent systems for testing and development which the customer cannot mess around with and wreck. Independence is very powerful in IT as the customer who 90% of the time is totally useless with technology can really foul the project up if they are directing it. If they refuse to relinquish control, we micromanage what they do so they can't get out of control and drive costs up at our expense. Uneducated customers are often good at making the developer pay for losses. I have suffered many losses due to useless customers who boss me around and me not countering it in time.
We don't trust the customer for infrastructure. They are generally hopeless! We pay the money and have parallel systems for testing to save our sanity as the IT guy. The investment pays off handsomely in savings down the track in reducing cost blowouts and inordinate amounts of spending on support by other companies out of the control of the developer because of the lack of knowledge of the customer about IT.
Penny pinching decisions on hardware and systems and networks by the customer are never in the best interests of the developer and only lead to impoverish him and the usual stuff up of the project and very slow payment of debts arising from this mismanagement by the customer. The developer who is so badly treated by the poor customer pushes away from the customer to survive but takes with him the source code and a good project management system that he can block the next problem customer with before they manage to ruin things badly.
Knowledge is power in retrospect.
If you cut your losses, you go ahead. Having no bad customers makes money. Making no money can actually make you money because your overheads decrease making you very nimble and not bogged down with bad debtors all the time.
As of March 2008, we have started creating repayment strategies for customers with large debts. This has proven successful. The customer pays a regular amount off each week and gradually reduces the debt. This stops us waiting and constantly having to ring the customer up to remind them to pay and stops the blockage where the customer is waiting till they can pay the whole amount before they pay anything which may take several months and cause a huge cashflow crisis for us to handle by getting a 2nd job etc to allow us to wait and get matters sorted out.
This makes us like a bank manager but it is not hard to setup say a repayment strategy for a customer of $100/wk x 5 weeks to pay off say $500. This setting up of repayment plans was resisted by us as extra overhead but it has helped us to get on top of bad debts caused by customers waiting to repay in full when several part-payments will do the same and also give us cashflow to survive rather than having to take out a 2nd job or borrow money off our credit card with all its high interest to survive.
This all happened because we did not want to use the NSW Sheriff like we had done several times before, mostly unsuccessfully, to get the money and wanted to avoid going to court as this would have made us get stuck in NSW waiting for all the court processes and delays and caused us to go even further into the red, so we took a different waiting, goading and repayment strategy and took out a 2nd job in Queensland till the customers caught up which seems to be working at long last! We had to negotiate payment strategies and sort the bad debts out - much harder but it eventually sorted, thank God!
We don't want to provide an interest free loan to people who do not pay us on time and treat our credit like a bank loan. They destroy our liquidity and make it very tough for us so we have several income streams we can rely on to get ourselves out of hot water when these kind of smart alecs take advantage of our small size in finding it hard to chase them up or go to court for late payment.
Companies know small companies struggle to get late bills paid so they just wait and make it harder to get paid so we just do other things and wait and get them to pay! Touche!
In 2008, we put in a big disincentive if the customer pays late - a late fee or interest charge of $100s - and we are starting to see them paying by instalments on a regular basis, not stuffing around and doing nothing for months on end to evade payment.
In the end, money talks. Nothing else works. It takes a hell of a lot of persistence to find out how to get people to pay and not keep fobbing us off! Late fees and interest payments seem to successfully goad people into paying on time, not squandering our precious time on administration. The delays in payments have cost us $1000s over several months in lost opportunities (we are just doing debt collecting instead of technical work) so hitting late payers with high fees is an effective way of closing off long overdue payments and getting them over and done with. Pressure is the only way to get anywhere. These sort of customers (rich end of town) know they can exploit my need for payment by delays so if there is no penalty they will just wait on and on till I break, so the introduction of significant penalities pushes them to action or they suffer from the fees.
If fees don't work, we pay a visit to the customer, even if they are in a distant town or city, and get the matter sorted out face to face, get final payment and close the overdue account.
Remember the importunate widow in the passage below. Evil will be overcome by good, just be persistent and don't give up before they pay you!
"In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.' "For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!' " (Luke 18:2-5)
We provide the facility for customers to download balance, tax invoices, quotes and memos via an email linked to the account as a self-service feature. This saves us time and the user can pay their bills and manage their account details better.
When we were based in Orange, NSW, we were exploited by customers for lower prices because we were from the country. Because we had lower costs the customer expected lower prices which did not benefit us at all. We moved to Orange to save us money not just be a cheap alternative to a city programmer with the exact same profit margin. What's the point of living in a tougher environment for no benefit? As a result, we slowly got worn down financially till we realised we may just as well work from a city location as the benefits seemed to be in the city's favour due to exploitation of smaller towns by cities.
When we lived in the country it cost us $100s to collect debts which slow payers knew so we just had to foot the bill and visit customers onsite to close accounts and not leave this loophole open for exploitation. It was an expensive lesson in being close to the customer to stop exploitation by getting us over a barrel. Unscrupulous customers in a distant town were squeezing us due to the logistics of chasing overdue payments being in favour of cities that were close together and cheaper to visit to perform the debt collecting. We put a stop to this with our bookkeeping and onsite debt collection which closed accounts and got late payment very quickly.
The only upside to this dilemma is we outsourced at our own expense all the customers business processes (Business Process Outsourcing - BPO) and did not charge them using our project management system. This small overhead quickly paid for itself and stopped endless waste of time by low skilled customers. The customer purely got an end product and we did not have to educate them on how to write software which they had little inclination or skill to do. They just bought a black box (product if you like) and the insides were done by us with no influence from the customer over our engineering process. This realisation of the impossibility of ever elevating the knowledge of customers led to many breakthroughs and increase in profitablity of our IT business for small business customers who had made us very poor by their bad business practices.
For 2 mths in 2008, we decided to put our business to one side and work as an employee for another company to give our business a standing chance after a hell of a year in NSW when due to cost blowouts and mean spirited customers we ground to a halt. God opened a door after much prayer about our future and we worked briefly for a Christian Group who use internet for a large part of their operation worldwide. This enriched our business but we are now back working for ourself as our cashflow kicked in from NSW after 5 mths waiting for payment. We also discovered it was much easier to develop outside someone else's business despite there being more risk for us due to the high overheads and lack of control involved when partnering too close to another business.
According to a 1994 article on AustLII, there are no reporting agencies in NSW to allow others to see if they are over their credit limit or overextending themselves due to the Privacy Act hiding their bad credit rating or high levels of debt. May be this debt level points to an incredible dependence on material goods to get meaning and pleasure out of life rather than living for spiritual values like faith, hope and love which do not prosper the body but the soul and are eternal whereas material goods perish over time and grow wings and fly away.
May be hiding people's credit risk is related to the high levels of gambling addiction in NSW and the NSW Government being unwilling to reduce gambling outlets because they get a high amount of revenue from gamblers. Several cases in the media point up people in key financial positions such as paymaster or contract management using their position to accept bribes or embezzle funds to feed their gambling addiction which wrecks families, futures and the public through squandered funds and reputations. It is the prodigal son run amok and being left to eat corn husks after his wild spending spree and a famine destroys his inherited wealth! After he repented and came to his senses he returned to his father's house and his life was rebuilt by God's grace. The bitter brother who lost all the money had to forgive and give thanks for the small amount he had or lose even his father's blessing so there is a lesson for debtor and creditor in the tale of the Prodigal Son. (Luke 15:11-32)
NSW, in my opinion, started sliding after the Year 2000 Olympics and is still way behind the other states in the performance of its economy so it is very hard to pick up business here - very competitive and cheapskate, not growing and expanding like the other states - because of high taxes and costs of doing business here that no-one is willing to tackle so we all devour each other to survive - the 'dog eat dog' world of NSW! Even Queensland has a 'dog eat dog' world but it is hidden behind a facade of checks, measures and bureaucracy which push me to work for myself again to escape the downward pressure on people with ideas and energy like me. My dynamic little business will survive all the rocks thrown at it.
Created: 10 Dec 2007 0:01
Last Updated: 16 Oct 2008 12:49