late payers self employed

[purplepeony]

I have submitted an invoice end of Sept. for work I did in August and am still waiting.
The company is a large multinational.
First, there was a change in HR so my original invoice was mislaid and I was asked to resubmit not long ago.
Now they tell mt their terms are 70 days- mine are 30 days.
They seem to be counting the 70 days from the re-submission- which was not my fault.
I am not a company- I work freelance. I was not told of theri 70 day rule when they asked me to do the work- they asked me to submit a monthly invoice and I assumed it would be paid in 30 days max.

Any suggestions?

Were there no terms of business or any kind of contract agreed between you at the beginning? If I'm doing some work for a company they always get a copy of my terms of business beforehand and I get them to return a signed copy. I also put my payment terms (30 days) on each invoice.

No terms- HR was useless - she left .
Ip ut my terms- 30 days- 0n invoice and it has not been honoured- i think I need to go back adn ask why I was not told this at the start.

Are they a company you intend working with again? My accountant advises ringing, emailing etc and generally being a nice, firm nuisance until paid, on the basis that those who shout loudest get paid first.

I would agree with llareggub's advice. If they want to vary the payment terms of someone they owe money to they need to ask that and agree it.

I would agree make a nuisance of yourself, and point to the fact that your payment terms of 30 days were clear on the invoice.

Oh, and I would hassle whoever does the paying direct, someone in accounts, rather than someone in HR. The person in accounts will have had no dealings with you and will literally have an invoice with payment terms on it.

As I say, I normally just issue my own terms and get them signed off, however there is a bigger company I sometimes do work for. They have standard terms they like consultants to work to, and they issued those to me at the beginning. As it happened I was happy with everything, nothing contradicted anything in my own terms, so I signed them. If I hadn't been happy with anything I would have negotiated.

I guess my point is if the company have terms they want a freelancer to work to, they need to make those clear.

Thanks all. The problem seems to have occured mainly due to staff changes but they were wrong not to tell me about their terms on receipt of/before submission of invoice.
I have sent a rather strongly worded email saying I am a freelancer not a large company. They responded saying they will see what they can do.
Account might be a problem as they are a high security organisation ( defence) and switchboard is iffy about putting anyone through at all!