You should not have to chase late invoices for work you already finished, delivered and stood behind, but you will, so you may as well be good at it. Picture an ordinary month for a self employed electrician: £2,400 sitting unpaid across three jobs. Two are householders who have genuinely forgotten. One is a letting agent whose payment run on the 28th somehow never quite includes him. He is not short of work. He is short of money, which is a different problem and a more dangerous one.
Cash in the bank is what keeps a business alive. Profit on paper does not pay your van insurance.
Most Late Payment Is Not Personal
It helps to start from the assumption that nobody is trying to rob you. A large chunk of late payment comes down to three dull things: the invoice went to the wrong email address, it arrived after the cut-off for that month’s payment run, or the person who approves it was on holiday.
Bigger firms often pay on a fixed cycle. If their run is the last Friday of the month and your invoice lands on the Monday after, you have just waited four weeks for no reason at all. Ask any new commercial client two questions before you start: who receives invoices, and when is the payment run? Those ten seconds save you a fortnight later.
Then there is the smaller group. The ones who pay everybody late on purpose because it costs them nothing and improves their own cashflow. You will meet them. They are usually charming.
The Groundwork That Means You Chase Late Invoices Less Often
Before you chase late invoices, be honest about whether your paperwork gave the customer an excuse. Half of these arguments could not have happened if the invoice had been clearer.
An invoice that gets paid quickly has all of this on it:
- A unique invoice number and the date you issued it
- Your business name, address and, if you are registered, your VAT number
- Their name spelled correctly, plus any purchase order reference they gave you
- A short plain description of what you did, not just “works as agreed”
- The due date written as an actual date, not “30 days”
- Bank details, sort code and account number, in a size somebody over fifty can read
“Payment terms 30 days” makes people work out the date themselves, and they will work it out generously. “Payment due by Friday 14 March” does not leave room for that.
Send the invoice the day you finish. Not at the weekend when you catch up on admin. The gap between finishing a job and invoicing it is the single easiest thing to fix and it is where most sole traders lose two or three weeks a year of cashflow without noticing.
Day One Late: The Nudge That Does Most Of The Work
The day after the due date passes, send a short message. Not a warning, not a paragraph of apology. Something like: “Hi Sarah, invoice 1042 for £480 was due yesterday. I have attached it again in case it got buried. Let me know if there is anything you need from me.”
That is it. No emotion, no essay. A surprising number of invoices get paid within a day of that message, because the customer genuinely had forgotten and now feels slightly embarrassed.
The trick is to chase late invoices the same way every time, on a schedule you decide in advance rather than when the frustration builds up. Day one, day seven, day fourteen, day twenty-one. If it is a system, you never have to decide whether today is the day to be annoying.
What To Say When You Chase Late Invoices
Tone matters more than most people think. Angry chasing works less well than firm, boring chasing, because anger gives the other person something to react to and a reason to feel justified. Boring gives them nothing.
When you chase late invoices by email, keep each message under six lines, always attach the invoice again, and always state the exact amount and the exact number of days overdue. Vagueness invites vagueness back.
By the second or third contact, add a consequence, stated as a fact rather than a threat. “If it is not settled by the 20th I will add statutory interest and the fixed recovery cost, which I would rather not do.” You have told them what happens next without raising your voice.
People who chase late invoices politely but relentlessly get paid before the people who send one furious message and then go quiet for a month. Silence reads as “they have given up”.
Pick Up The Phone
Email is easy to ignore. A phone call is not, and the fastest way to chase late invoices when two emails have gone unanswered is to ring the person who actually approves payments, not the person who booked you.
Call in the morning. Ask one question: “Can you tell me the date this will be paid?” Then stop talking. Most people fill the silence with a date, and once a date exists you have something concrete to hold them to. Send a one line email straight after confirming what they said. That email is worth more later than everything else in the thread.
If you get a date and it passes, you are no longer dealing with forgetfulness. You are dealing with a decision.
Interest And Compensation You Are Legally Owed
Most sole traders have no idea this exists. When you sell to another business, you are entitled to charge statutory interest on late commercial payment at 8 per cent above the Bank of England base rate, plus a fixed sum on top: £40 for debts under £1,000, £70 between £1,000 and £9,999.99, and £100 for £10,000 or more. You can also claim reasonable costs of recovering the debt. The rules are set out on gov.uk and they apply automatically, whether or not your terms mention them.
Two honest caveats. This applies to business to business work, not to a private householder who has not paid for a new bathroom tap. And plenty of small suppliers choose not to charge it on a client they want to keep working for. That is a commercial judgement, not a legal one.
But knowing you can changes the conversation. You can chase late invoices firmly and mention the interest clock as a simple statement of what the law provides, which lands very differently from “I am getting fed up now”.
When To Escalate, And How Far
At around thirty days overdue with no agreed payment date, send a letter before action. Say what is owed, what it relates to, what you have already tried, and that you will start a county court claim if it is not paid within a set period. For a debt owed by an individual or a sole trader, give them 30 days to respond.
A properly worded letter before action settles a lot of debts on its own, because it is the first sign that you are not going to shrug and move on.
After that, Money Claim Online lets you file a small claim yourself without a solicitor. Court fees start low for small amounts and scale with the size of the claim, and you can add them to what you are claiming. It is not fun and it takes hours. For £300 it is rarely worth your evening. For £3,000 it usually is.
Debt collection agencies typically take a percentage, often somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent. Sometimes that is the right trade. Getting 80 per cent of something beats 100 per cent of a grudge.
Structure The Job So There Is Less To Chase
Chasing is a symptom. The cure sits earlier in the process.
- Take a deposit. Thirty to fifty per cent on anything with materials in it. A customer who will not pay a deposit is telling you something.
- Stage payments on longer jobs. Weekly or at agreed milestones, not everything at the end.
- Carry a card reader. A tap on the doorstep beats a bank transfer that never happens, and the fee is roughly the price of a coffee on a £200 job.
- Use direct debit or standing order for anything recurring, like monthly maintenance or a retainer.
- Put payment terms in writing before you start, in the quote, and get a reply saying yes.
Do all of that and you will chase late invoices maybe a quarter as often. Domestic work in particular should mostly be paid on completion. There is no reason a mobile groomer or a gardener should be running a credit account for a stranger.
Some Customers Are Not Worth Keeping
There is a customer who pays at 75 days every single time, queries one line on every invoice, and rings you at half seven on a Sunday. You keep them because you are frightened of the gap in the diary.
Work out what they actually cost you. Two hours a month of chasing at your hourly rate, plus the interest on money you should have had, plus the jobs you turned down because you were holding capacity for them. It is rarely the bargain it feels like.
The reason most people cannot sack a bad payer is the same reason they underquote: not enough enquiries coming in. When the phone rings often enough, you stop negotiating with yourself.
That is where being easy to find pays for itself. A steady trickle of new work from local search means you are choosing customers rather than accepting them, and a simple site that ranks for what you do in the town you do it in is usually the cheapest lever a sole trader has. If yours is doing nothing for you, our small business website design pages explain what a working one actually needs to contain. Nobody should be chasing a bad payer out of fear.
Keep A Record, Even When It Feels Petty
Every call, every promised date, every email. A single note in your phone per customer will do. It takes twenty seconds and it is the difference between “you keep saying you will pay” and “you told me the 14th on the phone on the 2nd, then the 28th by email on the 15th”.
Nine times out of ten you never need it. The tenth time it wins the argument outright.
So How Should You Chase Late Invoices?
Quickly, calmly, in writing, then by phone, on a fixed schedule you never deviate from. Chase late invoices on day one rather than day thirty, because the longer a debt sits the more it feels normal to both of you. Be the supplier who always follows up, and you become the one who gets paid first out of a limited pot.
Pick your three oldest unpaid invoices tonight and send the day-one message on each of them, even if they are ninety days old. Two of the three will probably move. If the real problem is that you cannot afford to lose the customer who pays worst, that is a getting-work problem rather than an invoicing one, and you can tell us where you are stuck and we will give you a straight answer about whether being easier to find would actually fix it.