Leapers.
Little Guide to Late Payments
 
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Shifting your perspective.

From personal to professional

Saying no and conflict can feel really uncomfortable.

But try and shift your perspective on what's happening here.

Firstly, don't forget you're already out of pocket when you invoice. You probably started the work two months ago, completed and invoiced a month ago, and you're still waiting. You've paid your bills, for your equipment, software, countless coffees and biscuits, plus of course your time. So you've already incurred costs - yet the client has their work and still hasn't paid yet?

Secondly, payment terms state "payment within 30 days" - not "take 30 days to pay me". 30 days is the longest possible amount of time you are allowed to take me, but you owe me money now. If you're in a restaurant or shop or hotel, you'd pay there and then for what you ate, bought or slept on - you've already given them an extra month of grace to pay for your services. You're being lovely and kind. They're being late.

Finally, they asked you do the work. You didn't beg for the opportunity to work with them. They're not doing you a favour. And you can guarantee, if you bought products off your client, they'd be hounding you down if you hadn't paid.

I often find it can really help to remove myself from the equation, and depersonalise the situation. This isn't me, Matthew, asking for my invoice to be paid. This is Company X transacting with Company Y. Services delivered. Payments due. There's no emotions or negotiations. Just a binary transaction between two legal entities.

I might have even been known to send emails from 'the accounts team' who honestly are way less nice than me, don't take any nonsense, and just demand to be paid or threaten the consequences. Honestly, those guys in accounts. They say the things I never could. And it quite often works, even if I end up apologising for how blunt they were.

This helps me because I know that I'm owed the payment, and it's my own hangups about money and conflict which makes it harder for me to say "hey, you've owed me money for 30 days, pay up".

I don't enjoy doing this. I don't enjoy making the relationship a transaction - but I remind myself, from the moment they didn't pay me on time, it was the client who chose to step away from a relationship with mutual respect to a business-only transaction.

Yet - it shouldn't have to come to this, hiding behind a fake [email protected] email address or psyching myself up to ask for payment.

We as businesses have rights, legally and morally, to get paid on time.

Shifting your mindset from 'conflict' to 'transaction' can help to make late payments become simply a task to be resolved, rather than one which comes with additional stress.

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