Late payment is rarely deliberate. In most cases the invoice reached the wrong person, was missing a purchase order number or arrived in a busy week and slid down a list.
Which means the objective is not to be more forceful. It is to remove the administrative friction, and then to be consistent. Both of those automate well.
Fix the invoice before you fix the chasing
Three changes move payment dates more than any reminder sequence.
Invoice on completion, not at month end. A job finished on the 3rd and invoiced on the 30th has already lost you nearly four weeks before the payment terms even start.
Establish who pays before you start work. Ask, at the point of accepting the job: who should invoices go to, is a purchase order required and what are your payment terms. Every one of those questions unanswered is a fortnight's delay waiting to happen.
Include a payment link. Not just bank details. A link that takes one click reliably shortens payment times, particularly for smaller invoices where the effort of setting up a transfer is a real deterrent.
The chasing sequence
Five stages. The first three are fully automatable and resolve the large majority of cases.
Stage 1: five days before due
A short, friendly message. Invoice 1042 for £2,400 is due on Friday 14th. The payment link is below if it is helpful.
This is the single most effective message in the sequence and almost nobody sends it. It is not chasing, so it costs nothing in goodwill and it catches the invoice that never reached the right person while there is still time.
Stage 2: the due date
Only if unpaid. Equally short, equally factual, no change of tone.
Stage 3: seven days overdue
Still automated, still calm, but now explicitly asking for a date. Could you let me know when we should expect payment? A question is harder to leave unanswered than a statement.
Stage 4: fourteen days overdue — a person
Automation stops here. A phone call, from a named person, asking whether there is a problem.
Very often there is, and it is something you can resolve in two minutes: a query about a line item, a missing purchase order, an approver on holiday. You will never learn that from an automated email.
Stage 5: thirty days overdue — formal
A written notice referencing your terms and your statutory rights, with a deadline. This is a decision a person makes, not a flow.
What UK law gives you
Worth knowing, because most small businesses never invoke it, and its existence changes conversations.
Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts legislation, on business-to-business invoices you are entitled to statutory interest at 8 per cent above the Bank of England base rate, plus a fixed compensation sum that scales with the size of the debt, plus reasonable recovery costs above that sum.
These rights apply automatically. They do not need to be written into your contract, and a contract cannot remove them unless it provides a substantial remedy of its own.
Most businesses choose not to charge interest on good customers, which is a commercial judgement. Mentioning the entitlement in your terms and in a stage five letter is still worth doing, because it makes clear that continued non-payment has a cost.
The purpose of the sequence is not to extract money from people who will not pay. It is to remove every excuse from people who simply have not.
What to automate and what not to
Automate: the pre-due reminder, the due-date message, the seven-day follow-up, the internal alert to your own team at fourteen days and the weekly summary of everything outstanding.
Do not automate: anything after fourteen days, anything involving a customer who has raised a query or anything for a customer where the relationship matters more than the invoice.
That last exclusion needs to be built in rather than remembered. A flag on the customer record that suppresses automated chasing prevents your best client receiving a stern reminder while a partner is mid-conversation with them about a much larger piece of work.
How it gets built
Most UK accounting packages — Xero, QuickBooks, Sage — have reminder functionality built in, and for a business with straightforward needs that is the right place to start. Turn it on, configure the sequence above and stop there.
Custom automation earns its place when you need the parts the packages do not do: suppressing chasing for flagged customers, escalating internally rather than to the customer, pulling in job or project context or chasing across more than one system. That is business automation work and it typically costs a few days to build.
Measure two things
Average days to payment. The number that matters. Track it monthly and you will see the pre-due reminder alone move it.
How many invoices needed stage four. If that number is high, the problem is upstream — in your terms, your invoicing timing or who you are agreeing to work for.
If cash flow is the pressure in your business rather than workload, this is usually a better first automation than anything else on the list. Tell us how your invoicing works today and we will show you where the delay actually is.
