If you do work, you expect to get paid. If getting paid for your work requires you to submit an invoice, then you better make sure you don’t forget to submit it!

In this story, an engineer claims that he forgot to submit an invoice for a whole year!

The owner of the engineering company was not about to pay it, and it only got worse for the engineer.

Let’s see how the story unfolds.

Your lawyer’s letter will make things worse.

I own a small engineering company providing electrical engineering services.

I had a series of small projects with a large delivery company who seems to like the color brown.

These projects each had a small need for some mechanical engineering to design some heating.

So I hired a small local mechanical engineering company to do that work.

The engineer claimed he was underpaid.

We had completed one job a full year earlier and I had two more projects that he had completed and we were just waiting for brown to deliver final payment.

Apparently the engineer starts looking at his books and realizes that there was some time from the job that had been done for a year that he had never invoiced me for.

He calls me about it and I tell him that there is no way to capture that money this far removed.

When large companies do projects they create budgets for the projects and once that project is closed, the money source is gone.

He got a demand letter.

He insists that they should pay, I explain why they would not.

About a month later I get a demand letter from his lawyer, demanding that year old money plus immediate payment on the two current invoices.

A demand letter is simply a demand written by a lawyer, so it has no real power except the intimidation factor of being written by a lawyer.

So I ignore the demand letter.

He claims he has a new policy.

About that time I had received the money from brown.

I tell him that I have a new policy that requires a lien release before final payment will be issued.

Lien releases don’t have much power over engineering services, they are for contractors, but this strings him along.

After a couple of weeks I sent him a lien release that required him to notarize it.

The engineer ended up wasting a lot of money.

Me requiring a notary on a powerless document was just another way to mess with him.

About a month later I did the same thing with the other final invoice.

So in the end, this dude didn’t get his year old invoice paid, but did have to pay for his lawyer to write a letter, then wait for payment and waste time getting a couple of notary signatures.

That’s a big mistake to forget to submit an invoice.

He had to learn that lesson the hard (and expensive) way.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This reader hopes the engineer learned his lesson.

This reader thinks he was unnecessarily petty.

A lawyer weighs in…

This is another good point.

Another person thinks the contractor should’ve paid the engineer.

Want to get paid?

Submit your invoice!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.