We had customers take more than 120 days to pay us in our previous business. Sending the invoice was only the first part of getting the money in.
Our invoices went out every Friday for the work from that week. We wanted to avoid adding our own delay before the customer's payment process even started.
If you wait another two weeks to send an invoice, you've added those weeks to the wait. The job can be finished and the money still be a long way from reaching the business.
Then someone has to follow up. Automated reminders can help, but I wouldn't assume they resolve every unpaid invoice. People can ignore them, and a message being sent doesn't mean the payment is coming.
In our case, my mum did the bookkeeping and spent time chasing the money. Having someone pay attention to that work made a real difference to how we ran the business.
The follow-up could be a phone call and a straightforward conversation about paying. It's ordinary operational work, but it's easy to leave it behind the more visible parts of the business.
I'd look at the whole process. How quickly does the invoice go out? Who knows when it is overdue? Who makes contact? Those steps affect when the money from completed work becomes available to use.
You can be busy delivering jobs and still find yourself waiting for the income from them. We learned to give the collection work its own attention, rather than assume it was finished when the invoice left our system.
