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> - Payment shall be made in X currency, or an exchange rate at X date on Oanda.com shall apply.

Typically you would reference average exchange rate published by the central bank

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Oh and another lesson! Ensuring that each deliverable invoice is small enough that it falls under the simplified claims procedure (in the UK it’s 10,000 pounds) greatly simplifies collection.

It costs something like 80 quid to file for recovery in court and in our experience invoices are immediately paid up when a “Letter before action” is sent.

You burn the relationship, but arguably you probably don’t want it anyway.

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> simplified claims procedure

I believe this is what we call small claims court in the United States. The threshold varies by state, but it is a very effective way to deal with recalcitrant companies both large and small.

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I think the hidden advantage here isn't even enforcement, it's filtering
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> Ironically, the good clients pay within 2-3 days normally, and the difficult ones are very “long tail”.

Why ironically? Isn't that exactly what you'd expect?

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The ironic part is that the clients that don't need the looser payment terms (more time to pay the invoice) are the ones that get them

Kind of mirrors "it's expensive to be poor"

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I took "good client" to mean, "is easy to work with/communicates well/knows what they want", not just "pays on time". The inverse being, the ones who don't pay on time were already a pain in the ass to work with.
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It seems like none of these terms would have saved OP though
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I think OP needed "emergency service is cash up front".

In a different domain, this is the painful lesson of almost anyone who tries to help people in a bind -- you can try to help, but yours is unlikely to be the advice that sets them straight, so you shouldn't get too invested with unproven or, especially, proven unreliable actors.

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>> "emergency service is cash up front“

Neatly distilled I believe you are correct

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It's worth keeping in mind that the only practical "saving" for the OP will result in not doing the job at all, since this client most likely doesn't actually have the money and never will.

It should be, oh, short-term rush job in a foreign country for a sketchy client? That is most definitely cash up front time. Oh, you can't afford that? Sucks to be you, not going to do it.

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> - Late payment shall incur interest at 8% above the BoE base rate and a late fee of 100 GBP as per the UK Late Payment Legislation. Partial payments on invoices shall apply to late fees, interest, and then principal, in that order.

Do you mean 8 percent, or 8 percentage points?

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The exact wording in our contracts and the government guidance is “8% plus the Bank of England base rate”.

They mean “percentage points”.

https://www.gov.uk/late-commercial-payments-interest-debt-re...

As I understand it, from our lawyer, is that this exact wording is automatically enforceable in UK courts and easiest in the event of a dispute. It’s also generally internationally accepted.

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