The final account has dragged on for months

Both sides tabled a number months ago and the meetings since have restated them with diminishing enthusiasm. The people who actually knew the job are on other jobs now, the file only gets colder, and every idle month quietly favours the paying side, because it is your margin that is aging in their account. Stalemate is not neutral; it has a direction.

What moves an old account is rarely a louder meeting. It is a document built to be agreed: the account re-assembled line by line with its substantiation attached, the genuinely disputed items isolated from the merely unread ones, each difference priced, and a sequence proposed with dates on it, so agreement can happen in pieces instead of waiting for one grand settlement of everything at once.