After working with 50+ customers in last two years, I can tell you that not all customers treat vendors professionally. No, I am not talking about delayed payment (which is quite common in the Indian scenario, by the way), or reverting timely with the inputs on iterations. I am talking about mundane stuff like TDS certificates. After spending considerable time in July running after (annual) TDS certificates, I can tell you that it came as much more than a pleasant surprise when Cosmic Circuits issued us a quarterly TDS certificate.
While Indian laws allow a payee to request for a TDS certificate three months after TDS deduction, I have never bothered with a quarterly certificate hoping that the accounts department in the client's organization would take take care of it and worst case I would get the TDS certificate in April/May/June. But here are a couple of shockers. A foreign private bank who is a client of ours never gave us a TDS certificate for the payment made in 08-09. (to be fair to them, Form 26 AS does show that they made a TDS deposit with the government). A venture funded private company did not issue a TDS certificate to us (and also their employees) till last week of July this year.
In this scenario, I would like to thank Cosmic for focusing on finer aspects of vendor relations. When we signed them up as a customer, they told me that they want their vendors to grow with them. So much so that one of their cofounders focuses exclusively on finance, IT and admin although he is an engineer by training. I am not surprised that they follow a very well defined process for handling these important aspects of running a business.
