India (Part 2)

In the last entry, I was happy that we had ‘solved’ the situation. There was still a trivial amount of ‘cleaning up’ to do – we had to retrieve the now not-needed servers. But..

An intermediary in Mumbai handled the import taxes and transportation from the airport to the customer location. Following the standard process:

• The intermediary billed the customer for this service.


• The customer did not pay the invoice; we had agreed to pay it.


• The intermediary placed the customer on ‘credit hold’.


• Responding to an alert from the intermediary we placed the customer on ‘credit hold’.
  
  

Eventually we figured out what had happened. The easy solution, Credit and Payment told me, would be to have the intermediary change the billing address from the customer to us. I communicated this approach to the customer and got agreement.

I was happy that we had ‘solved’ the situation. Except…

Several weeks passed without anything actually happening. I called finance:

“What is the problem here? The customer is driving me crazy.”

“The invoice is for ₤800,000 – more than one million dollars. We can’t accept that.”

“The invoice import tax on 13 obsolete servers and transportation from the airport to the customer’s datacenter. Traffic is bad in Mumbai, but something is clearly wrong..”

It turned out that the invoice was for 800,000 Indian Rupiahs – about $10,000. Finance agreed to authorize payment.

Given the difficulties we had getting the machines into India, we were not excited about trying to ship them back to the UK. Luckily, we were able to convince server division to simply leave them in India – as a gift.

I was happy that we had ‘solved’ the problem.

Except

• The customer wanted the gifts to come with free (3-year) maintenance.


• Although everyone had agreed to pay, no one had actually paid.
  

To be continued.

The photo is of the Taj Palace Hotel in Mumbai.