You will learn from this. Chances are if you had done this almost immediately without offering to be paid for parts only they would have taken you more seriously and backed down.
The issue is that the "customer" has nothing to lose unless you charge interest. Worse case scenario the money sits in his account a little longer.
I bet in future you will have proper T&Cs.
Thats not me having a go btw, I bet if you ask everyone here if they have been diddled by a customer the vast majority will have been. It has happened to me twice, once I got 100% back with just the threat of solciitors, the other time I got around 70% of it back by taking a payment plan. Although it became that much effort chasing it up I just wrote off the 30%.
I now have a process I follow, invoice people, give it a week if I have not heard from them give another polite reminder. If I have not heard the following week then I lose the niceness and ask them to pay up. I dont even care if people say they can not pay until pay day, just that they acknowledge the debt and a date they will pay. I HATE it when people play hide and seek and you have to chase. I would rather them say it will be 6 weeks on monday if thats when it will be.
Easy for me to say, but dont give up being self employed, just explain to your supplier and arrange a payment plan, I am sure they would prefer that and you remain a customer than lose you as a customer becaue you work elsewhere.
Even then - we're pretty much guaranteed 50% before every job we do... stock is covered by this including part labour.
