The privalege not to make payments on time...

It has been about 15 years in the business of software development for me and yet I am still not able to fathom this basic question..

Why do most clients have the privilege not to pay in time while supplier/vendors are expected to deliver on time. ??

Now those in business will always say you must to a client audit and ensure that you do work only for clients who pay on time..ask for a 100% advance... C'mon give me a break, I am sure all of us have clients who still don't pay on time and we continue to service them in fear of loosing business.

Of course the excuses they give for not paying on time is even better like

"I made the payment but I don't know why the bank has not processed it"
"I will make the payment within 24 hours"
"My Accountant is out of station and the payment could not be processed"
"It will sent by the beginning of next week"

One of my best ones being 'silence' and no correspondence from the client at all, suddenly out of the blue his email has gone kaput or he is out of town. Oh, of course the much used excuse in recent times.. "I have not been paid so I cant pay you ..." ...... hey who gives a sh#@# whether you have been paid or not , we need to be paid, we also have a business to run.

As the grey hair increase on my head I look at these clients with disdain and a certain amount of disgust but have enough of a sense of humour to laugh at their pathetic excuses. They just use the vendors / suppliers money either to increase their cash flow or fund their so called business initiative. It is the vendor / supplier who should take credit for running his business. These "late payment as a strategy" clients just have no shame.. yes I know this is business but business is based on 'respect for money and who it is owed to & owned by'.

Of course to be fair we have also had clients who hired us for our programming services and have paid on time every time but they have been to few & far between. God Bless them :-). They ensure some credibility of this industry.

Compared to the state of payments for our programming services, I love it when customers buy our software product USB CopyNotify! instead, they have to pay in FULL for it before they can use the full version. What a feeling it is..being paid up front , on time for good work done. It makes all the effort worth it.

We are reducing the size of the company & consolidating.

The software scenario in India is fast changing and some of it has not been good for the small offshore software development services companies like ours. Rising salaries, retention problems, massive competition, clients not paying on time, some clients not paying at all have just some of the reasons that forced me to realize that we just cant survive this way and the end in our current state was near.

Also one of my biggest mistakes was not to specialize in a domain hence not adding premium to my services and not having any differentiation from the 1000s of other software companies doing the same thing. All we offered were programming services in environments such as vc++, c, c++, .NET etc irrespective of domain. We should have been offering specialized services in banking, insurance, embedded systems, some specific domain, some niche offering.. Anyway hindsight is always 20/20 and nothing can change the past.

We have reduced the size of our team, continued our programming services only to a selected few clientele and have also decided to concentrate on the development and marketing of our end point security solution USB CopyNotify!. I think our only chance of survival is to offering programming services only in a particular niche areas as well as taking care only of our long term loyal clients, trouble shooting consultancy and to forge ahead into software product development. We have tons of experience in product development but all this while it was for somebody else now we are doing it for ourselves.

After 15 years of having our focus only on offshore programming services based on programming environment, this is a very radical change for us but this is the only way to go otherwise it is curtains for us.