What to Do When a Client Doesn’t Pay an Invoice: The 90-Day Ladder

The invoice was due eleven days ago. You’ve drafted three versions of the email, deleted all of them, and now you’re weighing whether chasing $2,400 is worth looking desperate in front of a client you’d like to keep.

That hesitation is the actual problem — not the client. An unpaid invoice gets harder to collect the longer it sits, and the two weeks you spend deciding how to phrase things is two weeks in which the invoice moves from “recent” to “old”, the project fades from the client’s memory, and the person who approved the work moves on to something else.

What follows is a schedule, so you don’t have to decide each time. Each step has a fixed trigger day and a script.

Before Anything: Confirm It’s Actually Late

Two checks, thirty seconds:

1. Was it delivered to the right person? Invoices sent to your day-to-day contact rather than accounts payable are the single most common cause of a “non-paying” client. Your contact is not the person who pays you.
2. Are your terms what you think they are? Net 30 from the invoice date is a different day from Net 30 from month-end, and some clients run on end-of-month cycles regardless of what your invoice says.

If either check fails, this isn’t collections — it’s a resend.

The Ladder

The value is in the fixed days. Escalation that happens on a schedule reads as process; escalation that happens when you finally get annoyed reads as personal, and that’s the version that damages relationships.

The Scripts

Copy these, change the bracketed parts, send. Keep them short — short notes get answered.

Day 1 after due date

Subject: Invoice [INV-1044] — $[2,400] — due [Feb 25]

Hi [Name],

Quick note that invoice [INV-1044] for $[2,400] was due on [Feb 25]. I’ve attached it again for convenience.

Could you confirm it’s been scheduled for payment, or let me know who I should send it to if it needs to go to someone else?

Thanks, [You]

Four sentences. No apology for “bothering” them — you’re not bothering them, you’re doing bookkeeping.

Day 7

Reply to your own first email so the thread carries the history.

Hi [Name],

Following up on the below — invoice [INV-1044], $[2,400], now [7] days past due.

Is there anything holding it up on your end, or a PO number or form I need to add? Happy to fix whatever’s blocking it today.

Thanks, [You]

The question matters more than the reminder. “Is anything holding it up” gives a stuck approver a way to answer without admitting anything, and it’s how you find out that they needed a PO number nobody told you about.

Day 14 — pick up the phone

Email is easy to leave in a queue; a voice is not. Keep it to three sentences: the invoice, the amount, and “when can I expect it?” Then — and this is the part people skip — send an email immediately afterwards summarising what was agreed:

Hi [Name],

Thanks for the call. Confirming what we agreed: invoice [INV-1044] for $[2,400] will be paid by [date].

I’ll mark it in my records for that date.

Thanks, [You]

That email is now the record. A promised date in writing changes what every later message can say, because from here on you’re not chasing an invoice — you’re following up on a commitment they made.

Day 30 — stop work, and say so

Hi [Name],

Invoice [INV-1044] for $[2,400] is now 30 days past due, and I haven’t been able to get a payment date confirmed.

I’m putting [project/next deliverable] on hold until it’s settled, and I’ll pick it straight back up the day the payment clears. [If your agreement provides for it: A late fee of [1.5%] per month applies from [date] as set out in our agreement.]

I’ve copied [accounts payable contact] in case this is stuck in approvals.

Thanks, [You]

Two things happen here. The cc reaches somebody whose job is paying invoices. And the work stop is stated as a consequence you’re carrying out, not a threat you might carry out.

Day 60 — final demand

Short, formal, dated, and sent by post as well as email if the amount justifies it. State: invoice number, amount, original due date, what you’ve already sent and when, a payment deadline (10–14 days), and what happens after it. Keep every sentence factual — the audience for this letter is no longer your contact.

When to Stop: The Arithmetic

At day 90 you have three options, and the right one is a calculation, not a feeling.

Suppose the unpaid balance is $2,400 and your billable rate is $85/hour.

Two things fall out of the table. First, the demand letter is almost always the best expected value — low cost, no filing, and a meaningful share of stalled invoices get paid at that stage. Second, the break-even on small claims sits somewhere around $1,500–$2,000 for most solo businesses: below that, a win can cost more in lost billable hours than it recovers, and you still have to collect on the judgment afterwards. Claim limits and fees vary by state and county — check your local court’s published figures before you commit a day to it.

Writing off a genuinely dead invoice isn’t defeat. It’s the decision that stops a $2,400 loss from also costing you six hours a quarter, indefinitely.

This is general information, not legal advice. Contract terms, interest on overdue accounts and court procedures vary by state — check yours.

The Part That Prevents the Next One

Every collections problem is visible weeks earlier in the tracker, if the tracker is doing its job.

• Two open invoices to one client is the alarm. In the worked quarter in our invoice-tracking guide, a studio issued a second $1,800 invoice to a client already 34 days late on $2,400 — turning one collections problem into $4,200 of exposure. A sheet that surfaces “this client has an overdue balance” before you start new work would have caught it.
• Days-to-pay by client tells you who to pre-empt. A client who reliably pays 8 days past Net 30 doesn’t need a collections ladder, they need a Net 15 invoice sent a week earlier.
• A deposit removes the worst case entirely. You cannot be 90 days unpaid on the full amount of a project you took 50% for upfront — how to structure and track that.
• Terms are the lever you actually control. Before blaming a client, check whether your own terms are financing them — Net 30 vs due on receipt, with the cash-flow math.

The Rule Worth Keeping

Send the day-one reminder every time, on every invoice, to every client, including the ones who always pay.

It costs nothing, it’s unremarkable when it lands, and it does something no escalation ladder can: it establishes that your due dates are real dates. Clients who learn that early rarely need step four.

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