How to chase a late invoice
An invoice goes past its due date. You know it, they know it, and now somebody has to say something.
Most people wait too long and then say too much. They leave it three weeks because bringing it up feels rude, and by the time they do the message carries three weeks of resentment in it, which turns a bookkeeping oversight into an argument with a customer they wanted to keep.
The alternative is a ladder. Four rungs, each with its own wording and its own waiting time, and none of them written in anger because none of them is a surprise by the time you send it.
Before the first rung, check it is your fault
Most late payment is not a decision anybody made. It is an invoice that never reached the person who pays, or reached them missing the one thing their system needs.
So before the first message, look at the invoice itself. Is the purchase order number on it. Is it addressed to the company rather than the site. Does it say a date, or does it say "30 days" and leave the reader to work it out. Missing any of those and the invoice is probably sitting in a query pile, which is not the same problem and does not have the same answer.
If something is missing, reissue rather than chase. "Reissuing with the PO number on it, sorry about that" gets paid. A reminder about an invoice their system has already rejected does not.
Day one past due: the nudge
Send it the day after the due date, not the week after. Early is what keeps it light: at one day late nobody is embarrassed yet, so nobody is defensive.
Short, and no apology for sending it. "Hi Sarah, invoice 0117 for the Northgate job was due yesterday, £2,480. Anything you need from me on it? Bank details are on the invoice, happy to resend."
That is the whole message. It assumes an oversight, because it usually is one, and it offers to help rather than asking them to explain themselves. It also does the thing most reminders forget, which is to name the amount and the reference so that whoever reads it can act without opening anything.
Day seven: the phone call
If the nudge produced nothing, ring. Do not send a second email.
This is the rung people skip and it is the one that works. An email can be left for later by somebody who has forty of them. A phone call gets an answer, and the answer is worth having even when it is bad. You find out that the person who approves it has left, or that they pay on the last Friday of the month, or that there is a query nobody told you about. All three change what you do next, and none of them would have come back by email.
Ask one question and then be quiet. "I am chasing invoice 0117, is there anything holding it up?" Silence after a question is uncomfortable and the discomfort is what produces the real reason.
Whatever they say, write it down and confirm it in an email afterwards. "Thanks for the call, understood it goes in Friday's run." Now there is a date you both agreed to, and the next message is about a promise rather than about a debt.
Day fourteen: the formal reminder
Different tone, deliberately. This one is written to be forwarded.
Everything the first one had, plus the age of the debt and what happens next. "Invoice 0117, £2,480, now 14 days overdue. Please can this be paid by Friday 26th. After that I will add statutory interest and a recovery charge, as I am entitled to on a commercial debt." No adjectives, no disappointment, no threat beyond a statement of what the law already permits.
On business to business work you really are entitled to that, and saying so changes behaviour a good deal more often than claiming it does. The point of naming it is that it moves the invoice from the pile marked "later" to the pile marked "cheaper to pay now".
If the work is for a consumer rather than a business the interest position is different, so leave that sentence out and simply give a date.
Day thirty: the letter before action
This is the last rung and it is not a chasing message. It is the letter you have to have sent before a court will look at the claim, and it says so.
The invoice, the amount, the dates, what you have already sent, and a final period of fourteen days to pay before you issue a claim. Sent by email and by post, and kept.
Most of the time it never goes further, because a letter before action is the first message that visibly costs the recipient something. Where it does go further, the route for a debt this size is a money claim online, which has a fee scaled to the debt and does not need a solicitor.
The thing to be honest about is the arithmetic before you start. A claim on £2,480 is worth pursuing. A claim on £180 is not, once the fee and your time are in, and knowing which is which before you begin is what stops a small debt becoming an expensive hobby.
What actually stops this happening again
The ladder is the cure. The prevention is duller and works better.
Shorter terms, because 14 days paid late is 21 days and 30 days paid late is 52. Payment details on the invoice so nobody has to ask. And a deposit on anything long enough to matter, because a customer who has already paid you something behaves differently from one who has not.
Send the nudge on day one. It is the single change that moves the most money, and it takes about forty seconds.