Oli's latest post is about contracts which reminded me of a problem I have had over the past few months…let me tell you a story;

A few months back someone bought an osCommerce Template from my templates site. I think the cost was about £20 ($40) - they then installed osCommerce and installed the template. The install would not work, so the customer contacted me to ask for my advice.

I took one look at their site and could see that the problem was to do with MySQL incompatability and was actually nothing to do with my template. I advised of this, and further advised that they should search the osCommerce site for the fix. Or, of course I could do the searching and apply the fix for my usual coding fee. This was agreed to.

I spent around 30 minutes searching for the fix (please if anyone from osCommerce is reading this - fix the search facility on your site) and another 10 minutes installing and testing. The site was now working perfectly and the client agreed. Easy as 123.

I then sent an invoice, as requested;

please can you email an invoice … and I will ensure that it is paid by return

Whilst doing reams of paperwork the other day, I had noticed that the invoice remained unpaid, so I sent a nice, to the point, email asking if it had been overlooked. Here's the reply;

We have abandoned the OS Commerce software as it wouldn't work once the template had been applied, we have not asked for a refund on the template as compensation for the time to spent attempting to remedy the problem.

So, even though they agreed that the template was working fine after I applied the fix and they agreed to pay after being invoiced, they decided to rip me off for a very small amount of money. For anyone interested, the bug details are listed here.

The money is actually unimportant - more to the point is the fact that a small businessman would act so badly towards another small businessman. I always use contracts for large jobs, but never for very tiny jobs. This leads me to one conclusion - if you do not have a contract, get payment before starting work.

Actually there is one funnier aspect to the whole debacle; this sole trader/company supplies computers - and I am after a few base units to network. This bunch of jokers has lost out on a 4 figure order just because they would not play fair and pay the money they owe. Kind of shot themselves in the foot there.