Put it in your contract. "Work will stop on day 11 if payment is not received." This is why you (the contractor) draw up the contract instead of being at the whim of the client. This is not crazy, it's the clients choice if you stop working. It it's important that the project go forward they can talk to their accounts payable person. Otherwise they have little incentive to do anything. Instead of "You'll have to talk to accounts payable about that." it becomes, "Crap, my project is going to slip, I better walk over to accounts payable and get this straightened out."
No offense, but that sounds naive. Have you done any meaningful consulting work?
My experience was that the highest value clients paid somewhere in the net 45 to 90 range, despite contracts stating that we billed net 30 that included penalties and interest. And my experience was that it was actually fairly easy to increase prices by 25%, but extraordinarily difficult to get clients to agree to unusual terms (such as a halt in the performance of the contract in the case of minor payment delinquency).
I'm not saying my experience is the only experience, but frankly the only clients who I could imagine agreeing to those terms were puny, and unsophisticated folks who you probably don't want to work for anyway. The more sophisticated buyers all had a lawyer who would negotiate anything like that out of the contract anyway.
Yes, I have consulted for everything from startups to large multinationals but your experience may be more common/normal/relevant for HN readers. With the most recent multinational client, it took some time for my contracts to go through legal but they approved everything without any changes.
You find another client. This one is not going to pay you, and a bankrupt company will, in the very best scenario, give you a few pennies on the dollar, a long long time from now.
