We Used to Lose £3k a Month to Late Invoices. Here's What Fixed It.

I ran a small agency for six years before starting stedd.io. At one point we had £14,000 outstanding across a dozen clients, some of it 60+ days overdue. We’d done the work. We just couldn’t get paid for it.

If that sounds familiar, I want to share what actually worked for us. Not theory, but the specific changes that turned our cash flow around.

We stopped being vague about payment terms

Our early quotes said things like “payment due on completion.” That meant nothing. Completion of what? When exactly? We’d finish a job, send an invoice, and the client would sit on it because there was no urgency.

We switched to Net 14 on everything under £5,000 and Net 30 above that. We printed the terms on the quote and the invoice. We also added a single line: “Invoices not paid within terms may incur a late payment fee under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts Act.” We’ve never actually charged the fee. We’ve never needed to. Just having it there changed behaviour.

We stopped batching invoices at month-end

This was our worst habit. We’d do a job on the 3rd, then not invoice until the 28th because “we’ll do all the invoicing on Friday.” By then the client had forgotten about the work, moved on to other things, and our invoice landed in a pile.

Now we invoice the day the job is done. Sometimes the same hour. The work is fresh in the client’s mind, the value is obvious, and they pay faster. It sounds small but it knocked about a week off our average payment time almost immediately.

We automated the chasing

Writing “just checking in on invoice #1042” emails was soul-destroying. We’d put it off, which meant invoices would go 15, 20 days overdue before we even sent the first reminder.

Automated reminders fixed this completely. We set up three: one 3 days before the due date (“heads up, this is coming due”), one on the due date, and one 7 days after. The tone is polite, the timing is consistent, and we don’t have to think about it. Clients started paying on time because the reminder landed before they’d forgotten.

We made paying stupidly easy

We had a client once who told us they’d been meaning to pay our invoice for two weeks but “couldn’t find the bank details.” That was our fault, not theirs.

Now every invoice has our bank details printed clearly at the bottom. We also accept card payments for clients who prefer that. The fewer obstacles between “I should pay this” and “paid,” the faster it happens. Seems obvious in hindsight.

We got a single view of what’s owed

The spreadsheet we used to track invoices was always out of date. Someone would mark an invoice as paid but forget to update the total. Or we’d send a credit note and not adjust the tracker. We’d have meetings where nobody could confidently answer “how much are we owed right now?”

Moving to a system where invoices, payments, and credit notes all live together, updating in real time, changed everything. You can see at a glance what’s outstanding, what’s overdue, and who your repeat late payers are. That visibility alone is worth it.

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None of this is revolutionary. But doing all five together took us from constantly worrying about cash flow to barely thinking about it. The money comes in, mostly on time, and when it doesn’t, the system chases it for us.

We built stedd.io to handle exactly this workflow. Have a look at how it works if you’re dealing with the same headaches.