International agency payments across long engagements
Agency work fails differently: not one missing payment, but months of scope drift financed by the agency.
An agency's exposure is cumulative. Phases overlap, a client contact changes, approvals go quiet, and the studio keeps delivering because stopping feels worse than continuing. By the time the conversation happens, the unpaid balance is large and the record is a year of email.
Splitting a long engagement into ordered milestones with written conditions converts that slow drift into a series of small, checkable decisions.
Phases as ordered milestones
Discovery, design, build and handover become separate transactions in sequence. A later phase cannot settle before an earlier one, so an unresolved phase surfaces immediately instead of six weeks later.
Approvals that survive staff changes
Conditions belong to the transaction, not to a person's inbox. When the client-side contact changes, the completion test for each phase reads the same to their replacement as it did to them.
Retainers and continuing work
Continuing work fits the same shape: each period becomes a milestone with a condition describing what that period must produce. That keeps a retainer from becoming an open-ended obligation with no completion test at all.
Common questions
Can we run several engagements with the same client?
Yes. Each engagement holds its own ordered milestone schedule, so a new brief does not entangle itself with an existing one.
How do we handle client-side delays?
Where a phase depends on client input, make that input part of the condition. A milestone that requires an approval names the approval, so a delay is visible rather than absorbed.
Does the client see everything we submit?
Both sides see the same transaction: the conditions, the evidence submitted, the verification outcome per condition and the settlement result.
Structure a multi-phase engagement
Lay out the phases, their conditions and their amounts, then send it to your client as one schedule.
Related reading
- Cross-border workDistance does not break international work. Undefined completion does. This is how to define it, order it and settle it.
- Milestone paymentsSplitting a payment into stages only helps if each stage has a completion test someone else could apply.
- International project paymentsProjects are not just larger engagements. Their risk lives in the dependencies between phases.
- Software development pactsEngineering is the rare kind of work that already emits verifiable evidence. Conditions should be written to use it.