Getting paid on time starts before you send the invoice

Put a real date on the invoice. Not "Net 30". Not "payment due on receipt". A calendar date, in the biggest text on the page, formatted so nobody has to count forward from anything: Payment due Friday 14 March. Half of late payment isn't malice or cash trouble. It's an accounts payable clerk with 200 invoices in a queue, sorting by the field that's easiest to read.

That single change has done more for my collection times than any late fee clause I've ever written.

Now the rest of it.

Decide when the clock starts, and say so

Net 30 is meaningless on its own. Thirty days from what? The date you typed the invoice? The date it landed in the inbox? The date the client's system decided it was "approved"?

Big companies use the ambiguity. Your invoice dated the 1st gets keyed into their system on the 9th, approved on the 15th, and paid 30 days from approval. You budgeted for 30 days. You got 74.

Write it as: payment due 30 days from the invoice date, and put the invoice date next to it. If you're dealing with a large organisation and they push back with their own standard terms, you'll probably lose that fight. Fine. Lose it knowingly and price accordingly, rather than discovering it in month three.

Shorter terms are worth asking for and often granted without comment. Net 14 is normal for services now. Net 7 is normal for trades. I've moved clients from 30 to 14 by simply issuing the new terms on the next engagement letter and saying nothing about it. Nobody objected. One asked, and I said it matched my supplier terms, which was true.

Take money before you start

A deposit isn't a sign of distrust. It's how the job gets scheduled.

For project work, 50% up front and 50% on delivery is clean and defensible. For anything running longer than six weeks, split it: 30% to start, 40% at an agreed midpoint, 30% on completion. The midpoint has to be a thing you can point at, not a date. "On delivery of the first draft" beats "on 1 May", because if the client sits on your first draft for three weeks you still get paid.

For retainers, bill in advance. The month you're working is the month you've already been paid for. Clients accept this far more readily than people expect, and it removes the awkward situation where you're 40 days of work deep with a client who's gone quiet.

The trade-off is real. Asking for money up front costs you some clients, especially early on when you've no track record and they've no reason to trust you. I'd still do it. The client who won't pay a deposit is disproportionately likely to be the client who won't pay the final invoice either. You're not losing revenue, you're losing a bad debt you hadn't met yet.

Get the boring details before you do the work

This is the part people skip, and it's the part that causes 90% of the chasing.

Before the first day of work, get four things in writing from your client contact:

• The exact legal entity name to bill. Not the brand. Not the trading name. The entity on the contract.
• The billing address and email, which is frequently not your contact's email but something like ap@company.com or a portal.
• A purchase order number, if they use them. If they use POs and your invoice arrives without one, it won't be paid. It won't even be rejected. It will simply sit there.
• The name of the person who approves it.

That last one matters more than it sounds. When an invoice goes overdue, "chasing accounts" gets you nowhere. Emailing the approver, copying your contact, gets you paid. Accounts payable can only pay what's been approved.

I once had a five-figure invoice sit unpaid for eleven weeks because the approver had left the company in March and the workflow was routing to a dead mailbox. Nobody knew. My contact assumed it was paid, AP assumed it was pending approval, and the invoice simply didn't exist as far as the system was concerned. One phone call fixed it. Eleven weeks of politely-worded emails hadn't.

Pick up the phone earlier than feels comfortable.

What goes on the invoice

Keep it to one page. Include the due date, the invoice number, the PO number, your bank details in full, and a line-item description that matches the language in the contract or the PO. If the PO says "Q2 consulting services" and your invoice says "strategy workshop and follow-up", somebody will kick it back for a mismatch.

Bank transfer should be your default and it should be the easiest option on the page. Card payments are convenient for small clients but you'll pay a processing fee, so decide in advance whether you absorb it or add it, and put that on the invoice rather than surprising anyone.

Send it as a PDF attached to an email, and put the amount and due date in the body of the email too. Portals are worse but unavoidable with large clients. If they use a portal, submit it there and email a copy. Belt and braces.

The chase ladder

Have one, run it the same way every time, and don't let emotion set the schedule.

Day 1 after due date. Short, friendly email to your contact and the AP address. "Invoice 1042 was due yesterday — could you confirm it's in the payment run?" No apology. No "sorry to bother you."

Day 7. Phone call to your contact. Ask directly whether it's been approved and which payment run it's in. Get a date. Write the date down.

Day 14. Email to the approver, copying your contact, restating the amount and the original due date, and asking for a payment date in writing.

Day 30. Stop work. This is the only lever that actually works, and it works immediately. A late fee is a number on a page. A paused project is a problem on somebody's desk.

Say it plainly and without heat: "I'll pause delivery from Monday until the March invoice is settled. Let me know if there's anything I can help unblock at your end." That's not aggression. It's the same thing they'd do to a supplier who stopped delivering.

Late fees, and what they're actually for

In the UK, commercial debts carry a statutory right to interest above the Bank of England base rate, plus a fixed sum per invoice, whether or not it's in your contract. It exists. It's rarely collected, because invoicing a client for interest is usually the last thing you'll ever invoice them for.

Put a late payment clause in your terms anyway. Its value isn't the money. It's that it makes lateness a named, agreed-upon breach rather than an awkward social situation, which changes the tone of every conversation that follows. Get an accountant or a solicitor to check the wording once, properly, and then reuse it for the next decade.

The concession

None of this applies evenly. There are clients worth taking on bad terms — the anchor account that fills your calendar, the name that wins you three more. If you take 60-day terms from a big retailer to get in the door, that's a commercial decision, not a failure of discipline. Just make sure you've got the working capital to carry it, and that you're not funding a billion-pound company out of your own overdraft while telling yourself it's a relationship investment.

The test is simple. Look at your bank balance and ask how many months of outgoings sit between you and a client deciding to pay you in July instead of May.

If the answer is under two, your terms aren't a preference. They're the business.