Getting paid faster, without becoming the contractor who chases
Ask a trade business why they are short of cash and the answer is almost never "not enough work". It is money that has been earned and not yet collected.
The useful thing about that is it is largely under your control, and most of the fixes are mechanical rather than confrontational.
Nearly nobody is refusing to pay
Separate the two populations, because they need opposite treatment.
The small minority who will not pay. Disputed work, financial trouble, or a customer who was always going to be difficult. These need terms, documentation, and sometimes a lien or a lawyer.
The large majority who simply haven't yet. They meant to. The invoice is in a folder. They need a bank transfer they haven't sat down to do. Nothing is wrong, and the money is three weeks late anyway.
Almost all of the gain is in the second group, and none of it requires a hard conversation.
Shorten the distance between work and invoice
Every day between finishing and invoicing is a day added to the front of the wait, and it is the cheapest day to remove.
The ideal is the same day — ideally before you leave. The customer has just watched you do the work, the result is in front of them, and the goodwill is at its maximum. An invoice that arrives a week later competes with a faded memory.
This is the single highest-return habit in this article, and it is pure logistics.
Make paying it take under a minute
Count the steps your customer has to take right now. Open the email, open the PDF, find the bank details, open their banking app, type an account number, reference it correctly, confirm.
That is seven steps, several of which can go wrong, and every one of them is a place to abandon.
A payment link is one step. The processing fee is real — and it is routinely cheaper than two extra weeks of float, a follow-up call and the one invoice a year that goes bad.
Keep the other methods too. Plenty of customers pay cash, by cheque or by transfer, and the fix there is that your records must say which, so you are never chasing someone who has already paid.
Say the terms before the work, not after
Payment terms on an invoice are information. Payment terms on the accepted estimate are an agreement.
Put them on the document the customer signs:
- when payment is due
- what is due up front, if anything
- what happens if it is late
You will rarely enforce the late terms. Their value is that the expectation was set while everyone was still pleased with each other.
A follow-up that works
The sequence that collects without damaging the relationship:
Day 0 — invoice issued, with a payment link. Day 7 — a short, friendly message. Assume nothing is wrong, because nothing usually is. "Just making sure this landed — here's the link again." Day 14 — a direct one. Reference the due date, restate the amount, ask when it will be paid. A question requires an answer; a statement does not. Day 21 — a phone call. Not an email. Most stalled invoices resolve in the first thirty seconds of a call, because the reason is almost always something mundane. Day 30 — formal notice, with whatever your terms and your state allow.
The first three cost you nothing and recover the overwhelming majority.
Deposits for the exposure
If a job requires you to buy materials up front, take a deposit for them. Not as a trust exercise — as a cash flow fact. See deposit and balance invoicing for how to split it into two proper documents.
How this works in Pro Speak Artisan
The sequence is built in: the estimate goes out from the driveway, the customer accepts it from a signed link, and the invoice is issued from that accepted estimate — same lines, same totals, its own number, as a PDF. A payment link can go with it, and the money goes straight to your bank; Pro Speak Artisan never holds it. When somebody pays in cash instead, you mark the invoice paid by hand so your records match reality.
Fast payment is not a personality trait. It is a short list of defaults.