Getting paid on time, from the contractor's side

Your bill is correct and it has not been paid. In most cases that is not a judgement about you or about your work. It is a mechanical fact about a document that has stopped somewhere inside a building you cannot see into.

A payment moves when three documents agree and a person with authority signs. That is the whole machine. The order says what was agreed. Some record on their side says what arrived. Your bill says what is owed. When the three agree and the signature happens, paisa moves.

So every delay is one of four things, and none of them is fixed by asking when the payment will come.

The four places a bill stops#

• Your bill does not match their record of what arrived. A quantity, a rate, a unit or an item code is different. The comparison they run is three-way matching, and when it fails it usually fails quietly. Nobody rings the supplier to say that line four is short by two bags.
• Their record of what arrived does not exist. The material is on site and half of it is already in the slab, but no goods receipt note was written when the lorry came in. There is nothing to compare your bill against, so there is nothing anybody is willing to approve.
• The bill reached the wrong person. It is with a site engineer who cannot approve it, in a drawer waiting for somebody to carry it to head office, or with an accounts clerk who is waiting for the site to confirm and has not told the site so.
• The person who must sign has not been asked. Everything agrees, the file is complete, and it is sitting in a queue behind other files because nobody has put it in front of the signatory.

The first two you prevent. The second two you detect. The skill is telling them apart from the outside.

A fifth place, nobody's fault#

A fifth state belongs to none of the four, and we found it in our own software. A photographed challan becomes a receipt row matched against open purchases — and our matcher considered only purchases not yet paid. Money here often moves before dispatch, so by the time material arrived the correct purchase was already paid, and never a candidate. The challan matched nothing, and a challan matched to nothing appears on no screen.

Nothing failed loudly. If your bill sits in a state nobody on their side can name, ask about this class of fault: not a wrong rule, but a list of cases written before somebody thought of yours.

Preparing a bill that cannot be held#

Write the bill in their language, not yours. Everything on it should be findable in their system without a translation step, because the person checking it has a stack of other files open and will not translate.

Quote their order number on every page. Not your quotation number, not your job number. If the order was amended, quote the amendment as well.

Use their item codes and their descriptions. Your godown calls it one thing and their order calls it another. Bill it the way the order says it and put your own code in brackets after, if your accounts need it.

Bill against what their site acknowledged, not against what you dispatched. This is the largest single cause of held bills. You sent a full load; the gate signed for less. Bill what was signed for and raise the shortfall separately as a written claim. A bill that exceeds the receipt does not get part-paid — it gets returned, and starts again at the back of the queue.

Keep the unit the order used. A rate agreed per tonne and billed per quintal is a factor of ten, and on the page it looks like an ordinary line.

Attach the acknowledged challans. Not your office copies — the ones with a name and a signature on them. A bill with its challans attached can be checked by one person at one desk. A bill without them starts a search across two offices, and searches get postponed.

Show the arithmetic. Quantity times rate, then tax, then the line total, then the sum. Bills are typed by people and the arithmetic is wrong more often than anyone admits. Be wrong once and every future bill of yours is checked twice.

The same checklist from the buyer's desk is reconciling a vendor bill, and reading the other side's version is the fastest way to stop failing it.

Chasing in a way that produces information#

Most chasing produces nothing because the question has no useful answer. "When will it be paid?" can be answered honestly with "soon" by a person who has no idea, and both of you put the phone down having learned nothing.

Ask instead which of the four states the bill is in. Is it checked and matched? Is it waiting on a receipt from site? Is it with somebody for approval? Has it gone for payment? Four states, and the person on the phone can usually answer in one word.

Then ask for a name. Not a department. The bill is with a person, that person has a desk, and once you know the name you can ask a specific question next week instead of the same vague one. A file whose location is known moves faster than one whose location is not, because somebody now owns the answer.

And put every verbal agreement into a written line the same day. A message that says as discussed today, the rate for the balance quantity is agreed at the revised figure and I will supply against it from tomorrow costs nothing to send and becomes the only surviving record of a conversation that two people will remember differently in March. Send it while the call is fresh. The absence of a reply is also part of the record.

Fixing your own side first#

Three habits remove most of your own contribution to the delay.

Get challans acknowledged by somebody authorised to acknowledge. A watchman's signature is proof that a vehicle arrived. It is not acceptance of the quantity, and at bill-checking time the difference matters. Find out who at that site is permitted to receive material and get their name on your copy.

Confirm a rate change in writing before you supply against it. A revised rate agreed on a call and never written down will be paid at the old rate, and you will be arguing about it from a position of having already delivered. The order is the document that decides the rate. If the order was not amended, the rate did not change.

Keep a ledger you can produce in one minute. Bill number, date, order number, amount claimed, amount received, balance. When your figure and theirs differ — and they will, over a year, for reasons on both sides — the party who can produce a dated statement immediately sets the terms of the discussion. That is the whole argument in when your ledger and theirs disagree.

Deductions are a separate matter from delay and worth not confusing with it. Money withheld on purpose is not a stuck file, and paying less than agreed covers that case.

The short version#

A bill is not a request. It is a document that has to survive a comparison made by a stranger who is not looking for a reason to help you.

Write it in their numbers, against what their site signed for, with the challans attached. Then chase by asking which of four states it is in and whose desk it is on, rather than when the money will come. The bill that cannot be questioned is the bill that gets signed.