
Ask HN: What Do I Do if a Client Refuses to Pay? - Rust
I contract for a company that took on a client project that has ended up severely over-budget and over-schedule. The short version of events is that the timeline was quoted assuming 3 developers, but one left a few days in and the other lied on her resume and sucked at everything, including straight content entry - leaving just me to do all the work in a timeline meant for 3 devs. No one else was hired until the past 2 weeks.<p>Understandably, the client has <i>not</i> paid the company I work for since the start of the project. Meanwhile I&#x27;ve been averaging 80 hour weeks trying to get things done in a rush. I took no holidays, a single sick day, and have completely lost my entire summer to this project.<p>When it was clear we weren&#x27;t going to make the second deadline, I started capping my invoices at 40 hours per week instead of the actual time I was working on the project so as not to bleed the company. Soon after that, they began skipping pay days (for me only), or only paying partial amounts.<p>The company now owes me more than $10,000, my wife is rightly on my case about the whole thing, and they don&#x27;t seem ready or willing to pay any of the outstanding amount.<p>Two new people have been hired in the past 2 weeks to help finish this project and handle other work that I literally haven&#x27;t had time to do on this schedule. One of those people has both tech and management experience and has truly helped me fix the final parts of the project into an actionable plan that the three of us can complete quickly.<p>I&#x27;ve met with my manager and owner of the company on three separate occasions and I&#x27;ve always come out feeling like they listened and the financial situation would be taken care of. Each time I find myself grabbing my own ankles on pay day again.<p>So I ask HN - what would you do? I need to fix things, preferably without losing that money (we&#x27;re broke now).
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quanticle
I'm going to be brutally honest. You have 2 options: lawyer up and sue to get
your money or walk away and treat this as a very expensive lesson learned.

Lessons for next time: 1\. _Never_ cap invoices. Instead, cap your work. If
there's 80 hours of work, and the company is only willing to pay for 40, guess
what? You should only do 40 hours of work (and bill for it).

2\. Don't worry about bleeding the company. What's the worst they can do? Not
pay you? Hell, that's what they're doing right now!

3\. If there's a change in the work timeline, the contract should be
renegotiated. You mentioned earlier that one of the other developers quit a
few days in. That, right there, would have been grounds for a renegotiation. I
mean, unless the departure of this dev. was explicitly planned for, it
constitutes a fairly radical change in the terms of the contract — you now
have to do 50% more work than anticipated.

4\. "I've met with my manager and the owner of the company on three separate
occasions and I've always felt like they listened and the financial situation
would be taken care of. Each time I find myself grabbing my own ankles on pay
day again."

Whoa, this should have been a gigantic, enormous red flag. Words are cheap,
especially if you're of the sociopathic type that heads all too many
companies. What counts is action. I mean, even if the company is in financial
trouble, they still have a contractual obligation to pay you. Out and out
missing a payment is unacceptable. At the very least, I'd expect a clear
warning in advance and a concrete set of steps detailing how and when the
make-up payment will be delivered. And even then, if they consistently miss
paying you, fire them.

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jf22
This is meant for designers but inspired me to change my practices:
[http://vimeo.com/22053820](http://vimeo.com/22053820)

Its titled: "fuck you, pay me"

The video isn't actionable advice but worth a look.

If I were in your shoes I'd quit immediately once a payment was missed. These
situations don't get better in my experience. :(

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JustResign
You work for the company, not the client. The fact that they haven't been paid
should be irrelevant to whether you are paid or not.

If this company is living hand-to-mouth for payroll, are they going to be
around for a while, anyway?

Honestly, capping your invoices and continuing to work without being paid only
enables them to be shitheels.

You need to tell them that you will resign unless you're paid, in full,
immediately.

I would also consider talking to a lawyer.

(Please don't take any of this as criticism -- I've been in your place
before!)

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Casseres
Lawyer up. As long as you can prove your case, they owe you. If you have a
hard time obtaining supporting evidence, then if you have a good lawyer,
he/she should be able to pressure your company into a settlement.

Do not just walk away. That's unfair to you, and the company is just going to
do the same thing to the next guy. You may not care about the next guy and his
problems, but think about it this way: the company you now hate is going to
get more free work. Don't let them.

Do not work for free. $10,000 is not a lesson, it's a crime.

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PeterisP
If you're not getting paid, then you currently don't have a job, go look for
one. You have zero moral obligations to them if they're blatantly not doing
their part of the deal.

At the same time, you have a debt to collect - either through negotiation or
legal action.

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siscia
I don't really see the problem, you worked for a company, they have to pay
you, if they don't just sue them...

I mean, definitely is not your (direct) problem if the client haven't pay yet
and is not your fault neither that you missed the deadlines...

I would just be straight with your manager...

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dsleno
Lawyer up, baby!

Seriously. Start by paying a lawyer to write a nasty demand for payment note
with a hard deadline. This works for me 95% of the time.

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6d0debc071
I'd do:

1) Tell them you're not comfortable enough with your relationship to do any
more work until you see the money you're owed. Might also be worth pointing
out they'll still owe you for work done and that they'll incur additional
expenses searching for someone else to pick up the project.

2) Start looking for other work, this isn't making you any non-theoretical
money at the moment.

3) If 1 doesn't work lawyer up or walk away, depending on whether you can
afford a lawyer.

4) Never work with them again.

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dfraser992
Are you actually me? This sounds so familiar, I just had a flashback...

Get a lawyer, like everyone else is saying. The fundamental fault I made was
not enforcing my boundaries - this is the purpose of lawyers, to help you do
this, but you first have to be aware of it yourself. So if you are not very
familiar with contract law, learn the basics and how to analyze a contract
etc. Apologies if I'm assuming things, but my assumption based on what you are
saying is that you aren't.

I would recommend this to -everyone- in the IT field - there is now far too
money sloshing around and every clever asshole out there is hell bent on
becoming the next Steve Jobs. And learn a bit about the
Loser/Clueless/Sociopath theory of management - I ended up working for a bona
fide sociopath, as it turned out...

I too quasi-capped my invoices on this hell of a project - I lowered my rate
for certain types of tasks, given they were mostly data entry like stuff, so
it seemed logical and at that point, I was psychologically mired in the whole
thing. Somehow this website I was hired to build turned into my being the
entire IT staff for a enterprise B2B startup. As in everything - sysadmin to
QA to CTO.

I finally snapped out of it when a) the CEO lied to a customer about the data
we were selling - blatant negotiation in bad faith and the customer was going
to sue (and mostly definitely win) and B) it became apparent how they were
playing 3 card monte with the invoices and lying to all the salesguys and me
about cash flow issues while they paid off the loans their OTHER company had
made to fund the startup.

So everyone working for this company quit. It took us 6+ months to get paid
back because the CEO's wife then went and started pulling crap, reinterpreting
contracts and claiming people were not owed so much money...

I too, like lots of contractors, have a commitment to the job and
professionalism that you exhibited - I am certainly not faulting you for that.
But you have to realize some clients will consciously take advantage of that -
read up on manipulative people and how to deal with them. A good book is "In
Sheep's Clothing" by George Simon.

Then I suggest some deep soul searching / psychoanalysis to figure out what
your blinds spots were and why - it was all a valuable lesson for me and I
suppose it would have happened someday. I can say it was ultimately useful.
But 4 years of hell is a long time to waste.

So I hope you can find the silver lining in all this and I wish you luck.

~~~
avenger123
+1 on this. Thanks also for the book referral, seems like an interesting book.

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avenger123
First of all, the question you need to ask yourself is what type of leverage
do you have in this situation and what type of relationship do you want to
keep with this company you are at.

In terms of leverage, if you stop and quit right now, what will happen to the
project? Are you on the critical path? This does give you some leverage.

Also, what level of documentation do you have with regards to getting paid?
Based on your statements, you have met with management and have had verbal
discussions. I would suggest doing these things via email. Do not just leave
it to verbal communication for obvious reasons.

At this point, you need to build your case for yourself to prove that the
company owes you money and you have not been paid. This is not so much that
you would sue but that if you do go down that path you have evidence.

The next step would be to write an email to management stating:

1) The work you have done and how much you are owed. 2) A deadline expecting
to get paid (lets say a week). 3) What will happen if the deadline is past and
payment hasn't been made.

Be prepared for a couple of scenarios in this case. The company ignores your
email and the deadline is past. You need to walk away. How nasty do you want
to be is also a considering. You can backup your work and remove it from
source control and hold the company for ransom until you get paid (I know
someone that did this and they got paid pretty quick). If you don't want to go
down that road, quit and look at suing the company with the expectation that
you may not recover your wages.

The other scenario is that the company does pay you. In this case, take the
money and find another job pronto. There is no reason to work for a company
like this.

The other thing I want to add to this is that it is not your company and not
your problem that the client is not paying the company. Don't make it your
problem.

The most important thing is that you need to stop working without getting
paid. If you feel the company is going to screw you over, just quit and spend
that time looking for another job. Your payback with the company can be that
you spread the word in the area that they a deadbeat company and everyone
should stay away.

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27182818284
You should lawyer up as others advise, but I must be missing something because
the problems you listed are definitely not the client's problems. For example,
it isn't their problem you didn't filter candidates well enough, etc.

I would lawyer up, but also work on killing them with kindness. Make it right.
Gary-Vaynerchuk the heck out of them.
([http://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/](http://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/))

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dorfuss
similar topic:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353498)

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sdnguyen90
go to the next meeting with a baseball bat

