Let me take a step back as this story requires a little prefacing. We had been working with a particular vendor for many years. This vendor provided a very popular service for us and recently we've been overwhelmed with requests for his services so we found it necessary to bring in another, similar company to help meet the demand.
The new company had equal quality but quite a bit better pricing so at first we thought, wow, maybe we should shift more of the work to the new company -- better margins, equal quality -- it was a sensible business decision.
But as it turned out, this new vendor doesn't use hardly any technology. They still use what we consider a non-professional ISP email account; they don't check their email very often. Texts are hit or miss and their version of an invoice is a 2MEG jpg photo of a receipt book. No invoice number, no client name, no service date. Nothing.
AND, we had to chase the "invoices". This vendor was good, yes, and he was low cost, yes, but both those things meant nothing when we couldn't get an invoice without multiple phone calls and constant requests. The time it took to get those photos from him nearly ate up our profit margins.
So, as it turned out, the lower cost was simply not worth the time it took to chase the invoices and reformat his jpg images into something we could print and use as an invoice.
The funny thing is this company has been in business almost 40 years. They provide their service and collect payment in cash or check from their customers when they are finished. They typically don't bill anyone (or never have anyway) so they weren't set up to work with a company like us and they haven't modified their business model over the years to take advantage of the changes in technology, social norms or the growth of their company.
