Chasing is a system, not a personality

Most agencies have one person who is good at getting money in. That is not a strength. That is a single point of failure with a personality.

Ask an agency owner why a particular invoice is sixty days late and you rarely hear about the client. You hear that things got busy, that it fell off the list, that the person who usually chases was on leave. The invoice was not disputed. Nobody decided to let it slide. It simply required a human being to feel like making an uncomfortable call, on a day when there were more pleasant things to do.

That is the actual mechanism behind most late payment at small agencies, and it is fixable — not by hiring someone tougher, but by removing the moment of discretion entirely.

Most of the work happens before the due date

The instinct is to start chasing when an invoice goes overdue. By then two things have usually already gone wrong, and both were preventable.

The first is that the invoice never arrived somewhere useful. It went to a named individual who has left, or to a person who is not in accounts payable, or it needed a purchase order number it does not have. The client is not stalling; the invoice is sitting in a queue it will never leave.

The second is that it arrived but was never approved internally. Many organisations require the hiring manager to approve a supplier invoice before finance can schedule it. That approval is subject to exactly the same inertia as a timesheet.

Both are invisible to you until you ask. So ask early:

1. 1Day 2 — confirm receiptA short, friendly note asking whether the invoice reached the right place and whether anything else is needed. It is not a chase and does not read as one. It catches the wrong-address and missing-PO failures while there are still twenty-eight days left to fix them.
2. 2Day 20 — confirm scheduling“Due on the 30th — is it in the payment run?” This is the highest-value message in the sequence. Most companies pay on fixed runs, and an invoice that has not been scheduled by now will miss the next one and slip by a fortnight. Asked at day 20, that is still correctable.
3. 3Day 31 — the factual noteOverdue by one day. No irritation, no apology for asking. State the amount, the date it fell due, and ask for a payment date. Asking for a date rather than payment is the useful move: it is easy to answer, and once given it becomes a commitment you can refer back to.
4. 4Day 38, 45, 60 — escalate the sender, not the toneSame facts, different person: the account owner, then a director. A more strongly worded email from the same address is noise. A calm email from someone more senior is a signal, and it reaches people who can act.

The ladder is about who, not how angry

This is the part most people get backwards. Escalation feels like it should mean escalating language, so the third email is tense, the fourth is pointed, and by the fifth the relationship is damaged and the invoice is still unpaid.

It does not work because the person receiving those emails is usually in accounts payable and has no authority over the payment run. They are not withholding your money; they are processing a queue. Making them uncomfortable changes nothing they control.

What changes things is a different sender. Each step should widen the audience rather than sharpen the language:

• Accounts payable — the queue
• The hiring manager who asked for the contractor — cares, and can push internally
• Your account owner to their counterpart — a commercial conversation, not an administrative one
• Director to director — rare, and effective precisely because it is rare

Keep the tone identical at every rung. Facts, amount, date, request. The escalation is carried by who is on the message, and that is legible to everyone without anybody having to be unpleasant.

Decide the stop point while you are calm

The hardest question on a contract desk: at what point do you stop supplying a client who has not paid?

You are paying the contractor weekly regardless. Every week you keep going, your exposure grows by a full week of cost while the receivable ages. The arithmetic is unforgiving.

The margin on those four weeks is perhaps $1,300. You are lending $19,000 to earn it, to a client already demonstrating they do not pay on time.

Set the threshold in advance — a days figure, an exposure figure, or both — and write it down before any particular client is in breach. Two reasons. Deciding in the moment means weighing an abstract risk against a relationship in front of you, and the relationship wins every time. And a policy is something you can tell the client about early, without it sounding like a threat: we suspend supply at 60 days, so let's not get there. Said at day 20, that is information. Said at day 59, it is an ultimatum.

Report ageing by client, not as a total

A single receivables number tells you almost nothing. The same $80,000 outstanding might be forty clients paying normally, or one client four months late and everyone else current. Those are different businesses with different problems.

Report by client, in buckets, sorted by how late rather than how large — and put it where the people making commercial decisions see it. The person deciding which client gets the next exclusive should know which one pays at 74 days. Usually those two facts live with two different people, and the one deciding is the one who does not know.

Common questions