Situation: Teacher I’m consulting for wants to order lasers from Glowforge.
Process so far:
Quote from Glowforge gets a PO#
Glowforge sends Invoice with PO# to Accounts Receivable
Here is where it gets Chicken-and-Egg-y:
Accounts Receivable requires Shipment of Lasers before payment
Glowforge will not ship anything before payment
Any ideas for a solution?
Not sure what or if I can do anything at this point, as a curriculum consultant. We thought the lasers had been ordered in October, and it has been a nightmare trying to work between the school district and Glowforge’s e-mail only support. The laser curriculum was set to start in mid-February, but without a miracle of some kind, I don’t think it is possible. I told this teacher that Glowforge was the easiest to use for beginners to learn to laser, and that they would be perfect for her class. If she could only get them, I’m sure that would be the case! If anyone has an idea of how this could be tackled, I would love to hear it!
I wonder what they’ve done in other situations. Seems like there are a lot of vendors who want payment before shipment.
Maybe someone would be willing to pay and get reimbursed? It’s a bit of a gamble, but if you get mileage or cashback on your card, it could be worth it, I guess.
Points on a cc would be a nice bonus if I could float that much of an expense in my small business! The bigger problem is that if I buy the lasers, it gets murky about who owns the machine and who is liable if anything goes wrong. Since I want to avoid the possibility of getting sued if students on the other side of the country start their school on fire, I choose not to do that.
I don’t know how they manage to buy anything for student use if they have to have it delivered before promising to pay 45 days later. I think GF is doing great with this snarl, I just wish there was some other way to get these lasers to the kids so they could learn on them, other than the current process that seems to have reached a stale mate. What makes it worse is that they are only a couple of hours away from the shipping warehouse!
