Getting paid faster, without chasing anyone

Ask a shop owner about late payers and you will hear about the two customers who genuinely will not pay. Those are real, and they are also the smallest part of the problem.

The bulk of late payment is administrative. The invoice went out four days after the job, to an email address the customer last opened in March, with no due date on it. The customer is not refusing to pay. Nobody has clearly asked them to.

That version is entirely fixable, and it does not require chasing anyone.

The three things that cause most of it

The invoice was late. Every day between finishing the work and sending the invoice is a day where the job fades in the customer's mind. Paid on the day, it is a transaction. Paid three weeks later, it is a bill — and bills compete with other bills.

It went somewhere nobody looks. Trade customers often give the address they use for suppliers, or a business address handled by someone else, or a partner's email. The invoice arrives perfectly and is never seen. Both sides then believe the other is at fault.

It never said when it was due. An invoice with no due date is not overdue — it is simply outstanding. There is no moment at which the customer becomes late, so there is no moment at which they act, and no fair basis for you to follow up. This is the most common and most easily fixed of the three.

Take the money at the end of the job

The most reliable improvement available is also the least sophisticated: ask for payment while you are standing there.

The unit is fixed, the customer is relieved and grateful, and the work is undeniably real to them. That combination will never be stronger than it is at that moment, and every hour after it weakens.

For domestic work in particular, on-completion payment removes the invoice problem entirely rather than optimising it. No invoice means nothing to be late, nothing to chase and nothing to reconcile later.

Where that is not possible — commercial clients, agreed accounts, larger work — the next best thing is invoicing the same day, from site if you can.

Say when it is due, in words

Terms are not paperwork. They are the mechanism that makes "late" mean something.

Pick a term you can defend — on completion, seven days, fourteen, thirty — say it on the quote and on the invoice, and use the same one consistently. The number matters far less than that it exists.

Two things follow immediately. The customer knows when to act, which most people would rather do than not. And you know when to follow up, which turns an awkward judgement call into a clerical one. "Your invoice was due last Friday" is a factual, unembarrassing sentence. "It's been a while and I was wondering…" is not.

Deposits for anything with materials in it

If a job needs parts bought up front, a deposit is not a sign of distrust — it is normal commercial practice, and every trade customer has paid one before.

It protects you from the specific disaster where you have bought materials for work that then gets cancelled, and it filters out the small number of customers who were never going to pay, before you are out of pocket.

State it as routine, because it is: "There's a deposit of X to cover materials, and the balance on completion." No justification required.

Make it trivially easy to pay you

Every extra step loses some people. Bank details buried in an email footer, no reference to quote, a card machine you did not bring — each of these adds days.

The practical version: offer more than one way to pay, put the details somewhere obvious rather than at the bottom, and give the invoice a reference short enough to type. If you take card, take it on site.

When you do have to follow up

Once, early, and factually. A short message the day after it falls due, stating the amount and the work. Most late payment resolves here, because most of it was an oversight.

Never automate this. A sequence of increasingly firm automated messages does not know that this customer's mother just died and that one has always paid on day thirty-one. It will eventually send the wrong message to the wrong person, and in a small town that costs more than the invoice. Draft it in advance if you like; press send yourself.

Pick up the phone at three weeks. Nothing works better and everybody avoids it. A call is harder to ignore than a message and usually reveals the real reason, which is frequently that they never saw the invoice.

The honest limits

None of this recovers a genuine refusal. Someone who has decided not to pay is a different problem, involving small claims or a debt process, and no scheduling habit prevents it.

Commercial payment runs are immovable. A client who pays on the 25th pays on the 25th, and no term you write changes their finance calendar. Know it and plan cash around it.

Rules differ by country. Statutory interest on late commercial payment, and what counts as regulated collections activity, vary — worth ten minutes with your accountant before you write anything firm.

What to change this week

Put a due date on every invoice. Send them the day the work is done. Ask for payment on site wherever the job allows it.

That is three habits, none of which cost anything, and between them they remove most of what people mean when they say they spend their evenings chasing money.