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Topic: Sony Hack Hits Home
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-11-2015 09:50 AM
quote: Mike Blakesley
If they were addressing a bunch of movie industry people, they would be griping about all the hundreds of millions they've lost due to pirating of their movies.
You can bet they tell the same thing to the tax man, even if the company's servers weren't hacked.
quote: Jim Cassedy
They owe me over $1k dating back as far as October, and they still can't tell me when they might get around to cutting me a check.
Most obvious thing: don't do any business with them until they pay their bill. If they need to buy something from you, make them pay their outstanding balance. No matter how big a company Sony may be, it's not worth working for them or selling them product if they're not going to pay you.
I assume they gave you a purchase order number and what not. Charging late fees is one option, but good luck with trying to collect those fees. A lot of big companies love waiting a long time to pay bills and not pay any finance charges. It's like a free loan. They help their positive cash flow while screwing up yours. When it comes to people not paying their damned bills most think of poor people doing that. Well, there's lots and lots of businesses doing it and they have money in the bank. Assholes.
Filing a lien against their property might get their attention, if that's even possible. We've resorted to doing that against local businesses that wouldn't pay their bill.
Here in Oklahoma the Oklahoma Corporation Commission can, if it is interested, step in and help get the problem solved, perhaps outside of the courts. I don't know how many other states have agencies like that.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-15-2015 12:37 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
Most obvious thing: don't do any business with them until they pay their bill. If they need to buy something from you, make them pay their outstanding balance. No matter how big a company Sony may be, it's not worth working for them or selling them product if they're not going to pay you.
I assume they gave you a purchase order number and what not. Charging late fees is one option, but good luck with trying to collect those fees. A lot of big companies love waiting a long time to pay bills and not pay any finance charges. It's like a free loan. They help their positive cash flow while screwing up yours. When it comes to people not paying their damned bills most think of poor people doing that. Well, there's lots and lots of businesses doing it and they have money in the bank. Assholes.
I wish it was that simple, especially if you're dealing with bigger companies that represent a large proportion of your business and income.
I handle the billing and admin for the projectionists who work the private rentals in our theaters. Because of the 501(c)(3) rules, we have to invoice for our services separately from the building/facility rental. Those rules state in effect that a non-profit can rent out its building and infrastructure, but not the services of its employees.
As a general rule, the bigger the business the customer is, the longer and more difficult it is to get our wages out of them. I'm not convinced that this is out of maliciousness or the desire to screw us, though: I suspect it's simply that if you are a big business that processes billions of dollars of small transactions every year, you need a big bureaucracy to keep track of them all, and big bureaucracies are infamously inefficient and time-consuming.
My personal worst is a major studio that shall remain nameless, which took four months to pay me $351 for working a rental screening. The problem is that this studio will be the source of many other $351s as they're a major player in town, and we also depend on their goodwill for many of our normal (not rental) screenings to happen. So trying to put a lien on their property, or that sort of stuff, would simply be shooting ourselves in the foot.
I don't think they're doing this to p!ss us off or as a power game. It's simply because their accounting department is a cost center, not a revenue-generating one, and therefore they spend the bare minimum that they need to on it: hence a four-month wait, making suppliers go through a long and tedious online registration process (in other words, doing their clerical work for them), etc. etc.
The little PR agencies and indies who arrive with a check on the night are wonderful to work with, but they're only ever likely to be using us once.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-17-2015 11:22 AM
If you don't need the city's business (i.e. it would be nice to have, but your bottom line won't be hurt too much without it), and/or if their accounting systems allow cash payments like that to happen, then I guess that's the way to go. Our relationship with the studios is a little more complicated: they want our historic and well-known venue for their rental shows, but we absolutely need them for access to rare 35mm and 70mm prints that other theaters can't get, celebrity Q & As etc., without which we'd lose huge numbers of customers. So there has to be some flexibility and diplomacy in our case. Personally, I'm not so worried about the big boys/girls: they will pay eventually (it's not like they're going to go bust), and so I take the line that if I accept a rental gig from them, it'll likely be a while before I see the money for it.
I am more worried about the people who have no previous experience of organizing this sort of event, and especially the newer and smaller festivals, who tend to have less money, have under-budgeted for their events and know less about what they're doing. Even though I've only been doing this for just under a year, I've already compiled a "sh!t list" of a few names, who will absolutely be asked to bring cash or a cashier's check with them to the event if they come back again, purely and simply because of the time and energy taken in getting them to cough up last time.
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