receivables
The Invoice That Gets Paid First
Invoices are paid in the order they can be processed, not the order they arrive. Most late payment is a document problem before it is a customer problem.
An invoice that sits unpaid for six weeks has usually not been refused. It has been set aside, because paying it required somebody to find something out, and finding things out is work that waits.
Most of what makes an invoice slow is in the document.
Net 30 is not a date
"Net 30" requires the reader to know when the clock started, and the two sides frequently disagree: invoice date, receipt date, or the date the work finished.
Print the date. "Due 12 November 2026" removes the ambiguity, removes the arithmetic, and removes the most common stalling answer, which is that somebody thought it was not due yet.
Keep the terms line as well, because that is what the agreement says, but the due date is what gets acted on.
Put the reference they need to pay
Every organisation that pays invoices matches them against something: a purchase order, a job number, a contract, a property address, a claim number. If your invoice does not carry their reference, somebody in accounts has to find it, and that is the step where the invoice goes into a pile.
Ask for the reference when the work is agreed, not when the invoice is raised. By invoice time the person who knew it has moved on, and you are emailing to ask a question whose answer delays your own payment.
For consumer work the equivalent is the property address and the date of the work, which is how a householder identifies which job this was.
One obvious way to pay, visible without scrolling
Every extra decision costs days. A customer who has to choose between a bank transfer, a cheque and a portal they have to register for will defer the decision, and deferring the decision defers the payment.
Lead with one method, placed where it is seen immediately. Offer others below it. If there is a link, make it go straight to a page that already knows which invoice it is, with the amount filled in: a payment page that asks the customer to retype the invoice number is a payment page that gets abandoned.
If you take bank transfer, put every field they need on the invoice itself. An invoice that says "bank details on request" has added a round trip to its own payment.
The line items decide whether it is queried
A query is a payment delay with better manners, and queries come from line items that do not match what the customer believes happened.
Describe the work the way the customer experienced it, not the way your system categorises it. "Replace roof covering, 24 Birch Lane, completed 3 November" is checkable by the person paying. "SRV-204 x 1" is not, and the only way for them to check it is to ask you.
List change orders separately, with the date each was agreed and, ideally, how it was agreed. The single largest cause of disputed invoices in contracting is a total that includes work the customer does not remember authorising. An itemised change order with a date turns an argument into a lookup.
Send it to a person, not a function
An invoice emailed to a generic address is in a queue. An invoice sent to the person who signed the work, copied to the generic address, is in a queue and also in front of somebody who knows what it is.
For businesses, ask at the start who should receive invoices and how. Some want a portal, some want a specific inbox, some want paper. Discovering this after the first invoice is late costs you the first cycle for no reason.
Invoice the day the work finishes
The least glamorous and most effective change available.
An invoice raised a week after completion lands when the job has receded, when the customer's satisfaction has normalised, and after their own month-end cut-off, which can push payment by an entire cycle. The same invoice sent the day the crew leaves arrives while the work is visible and the goodwill is highest.
Within the business, the lag between completion and invoicing is one of the few numbers that is entirely under your control and almost never measured. It is worth measuring. The SBA's manage your finances material treats it as a core working-capital lever, which is what it is.
If you work for government, read the Prompt Payment rules
For contracts with the federal government, payment timing is set by statute rather than by your terms. 31 U.S.C. 3903 requires agencies to pay within a specified period and to pay interest when they do not, and the implementing regulations define when a proper invoice has been received, which is what starts the clock.
The phrase "proper invoice" is the operative one: an invoice missing a required element does not start the period. The requirements are specific and public, and meeting them is the difference between a payment clock that is running and one that has not started.
Many state and local prompt payment statutes work similarly for public work, and several states have prompt payment rules for private construction as well. Worth reading your own state's once.
Keep the copy you sent
Not the invoice in your system. The document that went out, as it went out, with the date it was sent.
The IRS publishes guidance on how long to keep records, and the retention period depends on what the record supports. For disputes the relevant property is not duration, it is fidelity: the question is always what the customer actually received, and a system that regenerates invoices from current data cannot answer it after a price change.