Late payment for agencies and firms: deposits

Where the money gets stuck

• Work started without a deposit. You finance the client’s project with your own cash.
• Endless back-and-forth on deliverables. As long as the work is not “finished”, the final invoice does not go out.
• The final instalment held back “until satisfied”. A test that only the client can declare met.

The clauses that matter

• A deposit paid before starting: work starts upon receipt of the deposit.
• The number of included revisions, written in the quote, and the price of extra revisions.
• A payment schedule by milestone, each milestone approved in writing, with an approval deadline: after it, the milestone is deemed accepted.
• Payment terms in days for each instalment.

Worked example

Fictional example. An engineering firm signs a 6,000,000 FCFA assignment, payable in full on delivery of the final report. The report goes through five versions over four months. With a 30% deposit and two instalments on milestone approval, the firm would have collected 1,800,000 FCFA at signing and 4,200,000 FCFA along the way, instead of waiting for the end.