Gawker 
Enter your username and password.
-
posts about #conglomerates more → 
Viacom's Nightmarish New Payment System
New York, 5:41 AM
Fri Dec 4
52 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip Your Editors:
Tipline: 646-214-8138
Editor-in-Chief:
Gabriel Snyder |
West Coast Editor:
Richard Rushfield |
Contributing Editors:
Valleywag:
Ryan Tate |
Media:
Hamilton Nolan |
Politics:
Alex Pareene |
Investigations:
John Cook |
Entertainment:
Brian Moylan |
Nights:
Adrian Chen |
Azaria Jagger |
Ravi Somaiya |
Weekends:
Foster Kamer |
Video Editor:
Richard Blakeley |
| posts about #conglomerates more → |
Viacom's Nightmarish New Payment System |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
03/13/09
03/13/09
03/13/09
03/13/09
Not having a contract or PO with a company with Viacom is inviting disaster. Anyone who runs their own business should know better. If your contact isn't approving invoices, again, that has nothing to do with the vendor who processes them. That's just some corporate asshole using you for a short term loan.
03/13/09
Due to deadlines that are sometimes so tight your work goes on the air hours after you deliver it, and turnaround times that are sometimes a week from the project being awarded to when it has to deliver, then factor in a giant lumbering corporate bureaucracy that takes months to move on anything, and you have a recipe for vendor abuse.
You see, while the contract may say it's 50/50 deal (50% upfront, 50% on delivery), I've never worked a project with these media conglomerates where they've honored that end of the agreement. Not once.
The standard chronology is: start the job while the contract inches its way through their legal department, a process that can take weeks. Receive a signed contract from the aforementioned conglomerate sometime well into production. Receive the 50% "upfront" payment a week or two after delivery, then receive the 50% "on delivery" payment sometime a month or two, or three, or six after that.
Just try seeking redress in a situation like that, or try making a stink about it. If you squawk, guaranteed you'll see that invoice paid in time for you to give the balance to your grandkids as a college graduation gift.
03/13/09
Except IBM. IBM is the fascist Italian empire of corporate accounts. They pay like a Swiss watch.