How do you stop chasing invoices?

Scott Burns, founder of Glo Business Solutions. Published 13 September 2026.

If you invoice on a Sunday evening, this is for you. Not because Sunday evening is the wrong time to do it, but because the invoice you send on Sunday is for work that was finished on Tuesday, and the chase you send weeks later will be for money that was already late when you noticed. The problem is not the chasing. It is that the whole thing runs on somebody remembering, and that somebody is you.

Why chasing fails when it is a person's job to remember

Nobody starts a business to send reminders. Chasing an invoice is the least pleasant job in the week, because it means asking somebody you like for money they already owe you, and it is the easiest job to put off, because nothing happens on the day you put it off. So it gets put off. The chase goes out when the money is badly late and the tone has gone from friendly to strained, and the client, who had genuinely forgotten, now feels accused.

The deeper problem is that the timing of the chase is set by feeling rather than by the calendar. You chase when you notice the bank balance, or when a supplier chases you, or when a quiet Tuesday leaves you looking at the ledger. None of those has anything to do with when the invoice fell due. Two clients who are equally late get treated completely differently, depending on your week.

And the invoice itself is often late before the chase even begins. Work approved on a Tuesday and invoiced the following Sunday has already lost most of a week. If your terms run from the invoice date, the client has not done anything wrong yet; you have simply started the clock late and then complained that it ran out.

The four things that actually fix it

None of these needs software. All four can be done with a diary and a template. The point of listing them is that the fix is a set of habits, and the software, if you ever get any, only exists to hold those habits when you are too busy to.

Issue the invoice the day the work is approved

The single largest improvement most businesses can make is to close the gap between the work being signed off and the invoice going out. Not the day the job finishes; the day the client agrees it is finished. That is the moment they are most pleased with you and least likely to query the figure. Every day between that moment and the invoice is a day added to your payment terms for free.

If the reason for the delay is that the invoice has to be assembled, from a timesheet, a quote and a list of extras, then the fix is to have those in one place before the job ends, so the invoice is a draft that needs checking rather than a document that needs writing.

Put the terms where the client sees them

Payment terms hidden in a footer, or in a document sent once at the start of the relationship, are not terms the client is holding in their head. Put them on the quote, on the invoice, and in the email that carries the invoice. The due date should be a date, not a number of days, because a date can be put in a diary and a number of days has to be worked out.

The same goes for how to pay. A client who has to ring for your bank details has been given a reason to leave it until tomorrow. Bank details, a reference, and any way of paying by card or link should be on the invoice itself.

Chase on a schedule, not on a feeling

Decide in advance when the chases go out and what each one says, and then send them on those days regardless of how you feel about the client. A gentle note the day the invoice falls due, a firmer one a set number of days later, and a final one that says plainly what happens next. Write all three now, while nobody is late and you are not annoyed.

The schedule does two things. It removes the decision, which is where the delay came from, and it makes the chasing fair. Every client gets the same sequence at the same intervals. A client who is chased the day the invoice falls due cannot feel singled out, because everybody is.

Make the chase sound like you

A template written by somebody else reads like a template written by somebody else, and a client who has known you for years will notice. The reminders should be in the words you would use on the phone. Short, specific, and without the phrase "as per our terms", which nobody has ever said aloud.

The first reminder is a courtesy: this fell due today, here it is again in case it went astray. The second assumes an oversight rather than a refusal. Only the third needs to say what happens if it is not paid, and even that should be a statement of fact rather than a threat.

What it looks like when a system does the remembering

Everything above can be done by hand, and for a business with a handful of invoices a month it should be. The trouble starts when there are enough invoices that the schedule itself becomes a job. That is the point at which a system earns its keep, and it is worth being precise about what such a system does and does not do.

It watches which invoices are open and works out when the next nudge is due. It drafts that nudge, in your wording, from the templates you wrote on the day nobody was late. It holds the invoice as a draft until somebody has checked it, so nothing is marked as issued until it has been approved, and it keeps chasing on the schedule you set until the money arrives. That is the whole job, and it is a job of remembering rather than of judgement.

What it does not do is decide to let a good client off, or soften a chase because the client has been ill, or notice that an invoice is disputed rather than forgotten. Those are still yours. A well-built system puts the draft in front of you and lets you change or cancel it, which is why the approval step matters more than the automation.

The signs that a system is built the right way round are simple. Nothing goes out without a person having seen it. The wording is yours, not a vendor's. The schedule is a setting you can change, not a rule you have to accept. And the record of what was sent, when, and what came back is somewhere you can see it, so that when a client says they never received a reminder, you can look.

Where to start this week

• ·Move invoicing to the day the work is approved, even if that means invoicing more often.
• ·Put the due date, as a date, and the bank details on the invoice and in the covering email.
• ·Write your three reminders now, in your own words, and decide the days they go out.
• ·Send them on those days for a month, to everybody, and see what changes.

If after a month the schedule is running but you are the one running it, that is the moment to look at having it done for you. On this site that is the Money solution, which turns approved work into an invoice and chases it in your wording, and the Follow Up Manager among the automations on the services page. Neither is needed to do what this article describes. They exist for the month after you have proved it works and would rather not keep doing it by hand.