I can't tell whether to settle or keep fighting

Every disputed account reaches this fork. Fighting has real costs in time, fees and attention, and settling too early hands back money the file would have won. The honest difficulty is that by this stage nobody close to the job is neutral: the team that lived the project overvalues the grievance, the accountant undervalues the entitlement, and the offer sits somewhere in between, expiring.

What the decision needs is a cold read of the file: which heads would survive an adjudicator, what the realistic range is, and what pursuing it would take. With that in hand, settlement becomes a calculation instead of a mood, and if the answer is fight, the same read becomes the plan. If the answer is settle, the negotiation is run knowing what walking away is worth.