Many years ago we did work for a national retail outlet chain. This was before email was widely used here and the first time I invoiced them I took the whole months paperwork to their head office and presented it to their accounts dept. The accountant looked over it and signed it off, he went to the owners office to get the cheque sorted out and came back with a cheque signed and in an envelope. I promptly trotted off to the bank and deposited said cheque.
At the month end my bookkeeper approached me about the deposit amount being short of the invoiced amount. I was surprised and phoned the accountant at their head office to inquire why. He started laughing and said that the owner always issues the cheque minus a 'settlement amount' or 'discount' which he feels should be due. I nearly spewed and told the accountant exactly what I though about this and also set him straight on a few things about his mother. He said the best thing to do was just to preempt the discount and to work an appropriate amount into the invoice under 'sundries' for example as this was what the other contractors did. I spoke to the owner who just told me that he'd been in the business long enough to know what was a fair price for what and I should just be thankful for the work.
Well for the next two years we did work for these people I nailed them hard. Their invoicing, whilst not quite illegal certainly fell into the creative bracket. My mark-up on materials was nothing short of rude and we billed them a labour rate that was 30% higher than anyone else we worked for. I also added a 'sundries' charge to every single job as the accountant suggested. The punitive billing made up for the unauthorised discounts at least by a factor of three but none the less it still made me annoyed every time I saw the payments short.
Needless to say eventually they must have realised we were charging extortionate prices and they started using other contracting companies. The work from them started dwindling to nothing so two weeks before Christmas when their offices had just closed I sent them a summons for all the amounts they had given themselves as discount over the last two years or so. As expected they didn't reply or acknowledge so two days before Christmas the courts issued a 'summary judgment' for the full amount plus extortionate legal fees. On the 4th Jan I informed them on their first day back after the holidays they had 21 days to pay the 85,000 Rands (about seven and a half thousand quid) and after this time the Sheriff of the Court would attach goods to the value of the amount for sale by auction.
After a few unpleasant phone calls which ranged from pleading to outright threats, they paid but they've never used us as a contractor since. A couple of years later I saw the company owner, who was in his eighties and looking a bit worse for wear by that stage, at a refrigeration trade show. He looked at me for a short while and I could see on his face as the realization dawned on him who I was, he didn't look very happy as about turned and walked off at high speed. I also spoke to another contractor who did work for them long after us and he had suffered exactly the same treatment. Some people never learn.....I advised him how I eventually recovered the unauthorised discounts and after our little chat, he was planning to do the same.
