Bookkeeper slipped a $2,300 'consulting fee' onto my invoice and I caught it at 11pm
Found it while reconciling receipts at my kitchen table in Denver last Tuesday, and the agency tried to say it was a 'standard onboarding charge.' I emailed back the signed scope doc with that line highlighted and they refunded it in 20 minutes, so has anyone else had a vendor pad a bill and act like you were the confused one?
The part about them calling it a "standard onboarding charge" is what gets me, because that phrase is doing a lot of work. It sounds so boring and normal that most people just pay it and move on, which is exactly why they try it. What you did with the signed scope doc is the whole ballgame though, because now the burden flips and they have to either point to where that fee was agreed to or admit there is no such line. I bet if you had called instead of emailed, you would have gotten a totally different runaround, since a paper trail scares them way more than a phone call ever will. Feels like this kind of padding is less about the money and more about testing who is actually reading the invoice line by line.