ABSTRACT
The terms of payment are part of the contract and must therefore be settled before the contract is signed. Sometimes this arises during the final negotiations. I can remember one occasion when everything (including the price) was more or less agreed and ready for signing, when the purchaser’s purchasing officer changed the terms of payment in the contract documents to make them less favourable for the contractor. When everyone in the contractor’s company had already been told that the order was in the bag, this was psychologically hard to resist. It seems too trivial a matter for us to start raising objections at this stage – it’s not as if they were demanding a price cut!
