My Clients Keep Ghosting Invoices and I'm So Fucking Done

Do not see clients who do not pay as clients, but as liabilities. The real solution isn't chasing them with smarter reminders, it is changing how you work.

Take partial or full payment upfront, use incremental milestones, and only extend credit to proven partners with a solid track record.

Chasing money after delivery just wastes time and energy. Protect your work, and time, and sanity, not your clients' excuses.

1. Get half up front so they are taking the engagement seriously. Call it a retainer fee if you need to. Proves you’re in their accounting system and that the actual buyer is motivated enough to get you on-boarded and paid so that they can get going on the project. There is nothing wrong with half up front. You’ve got expenses while the project is ongoing. It’s a good way to improve you’re overall cash flow.

2. Accounting people and the people you’re actually working with are almost never the same humans. Make sure you know the exact submission process to get the invoice into your clients accounting system. The larger the company you’re contracting with, the more complex and exacting their processes are likely to be. Very large companies tend to use systems like Coupa, and there’s a learning curve to interacting with them.

3. Make sure you have a PO, and then reference that PO on the invoice. Most accounting folks will ignore requests for payment that feel “blind”. It’s part of their anti-fraud and due diligence. Lots of automated, AI-driven fraud out there. We see fake invoices all the time. Don’t do business on a handshake. Document that buying process, including a signature on a scope of work, quote, or similar document that can serve as a contract.

4. As a small company or indie contractor, you can put terms of service as Net 15, payable upon receipt, or whatever you want. Yes, you need to put something on there…but generally speaking, it doesn’t matter what terms you set, especially to larger companies. They’ll pay you when they pay you according to their own byzantine policies, and their payment terms will override yours. We’ve noticed that the biggest companies tend to pay 90 days + day of the month the invoice was submitted, but have never experienced anything longer than that unless the buyer is going through their own hardships or other shenanigans are afoot.

5. We generally engage with accounting contacts to track down late payments, but will go back to the actual buyer that contracted us and ask for help if a payment gets stuck or the accounting folks are ghosting us. In our experience, the actual buyer is usually embarrassed that an invoice is unpaid and can shake the money loose.

6. Finally…getting paid is a PITA. 100%. But if you can put up with the nonsense of having to track it down, you’re almost certain to get paid…eventually. In over a decade of small business work, we’ve never not gotten paid for an invoice, because we were persistent. But yeah, late payments suck especially if you’re going through tight cash flow.

Hang in there and good luck. I feel your frustration.

If a payment is late, call them directly that day and be firm. Not mean or harsh, just firm. "Hi, your payment did not come through, please take care of it so I can start working for you again." And then stop working with them until it does.

To answer your question, no. I would never pay for an automated service to email payment reminders. Because emails are ignorable.

This is not long enough. You can say whatever deadline you want on your invoice, but in reality it will be paid approximately 30-120 days after it gets received by the person responsible for paying invoices at the company you work with.

> two weeks later i’m refreshing stripe like a fool

This is still definitely not long enough. Also, Stripe is extremely risky. One chargeback and you can lose a lot.

> just trying to see if this pain’s real enough that people (like you) would drop around $49/mo for it

No: Invoicing/billing/client contact info is the most important data a small business should keep secure. Further, I would never let an automated system reach out to valued clients on my behalf--ever. I have high standards for apps I give access to my financials/P&L/client list and it would take years of trust and reviews before I'd ever consider something like this.

> i just need to know if this is a real pain

It sounds 100% self-inflicted and easy to solve. If you want to be paid the second work is over, use a system where the funds are escrowed and released upon client approval of the project.

Otherwise, all you need to solve your pain is to build a 90 day runway of funds (at least) so your clients can follow their standard processes for invoice payment.

As for the AI solution you're suggesting, it's probably too easy for people to automate that kind of thing, so it might be a tough sell if you're charging $49 for it. But who knows.

0. Getting paid is your job. Getting paid is more important than doing the work.

1. Pick better clients. Good clients don't have a problem with paying (and great clients are good clients who have regular work).

2. Be blunt about money. Upfront. Require a retainer as part of your contract. You will avoid clients who never intend to pay.

3. You are not a bank. Your retainer is to be applied against final invoice. You owe the client work. They don't owe you money. If a client says they don't have the money, there's no point in doing the work.

4. People who don't intend to pay will almost always tell you they don't intend to pay before you start the work...maybe a "joke" about not paying or a comment "you are charging too much." It lets them rationalize you had it coming because they gave you a warning. Those aren't jokes or complaints. They are statements of intent.

5. If someone's budget does not match their scope, reduce the scope not your fee. Your job is to solve the problems the client is paying you to solve. It is impossible to be paid for solving the problem of paying you less.

6. When someone doesn't pay, stop working. When they owe you money, don't deliver deliverables.

7. Established business relationships with regular clients, can change some of this...the client you've worked with for years can actually be joking about money because you two have a track record.

Good luck.

The question "why would they trust me to deliver?" is a good one. And there are two answers:

1. How you sell will determine their trust level. In my sales deck, I have testimonials, case studies and the outline of our full process. By the end of the presentation, when I tell them the price, they expected $10,000, but it's only $4,000. I ask them to pay the 4k now. Or, pay 2 payments of $2,500.

2. If the prospect asks us to do ALL the work first, then invoice, I say the following: "if we do all the work first, it means that you have no skin in the game. In the past, that hurt my business because people would disappear after my team spent 300 hours working. For that reason, it's not our policy to do all the work first. We have 2 options."

Then, i end off by saying: "if that's a deal breaker, I understand and I will happy send you the plan for what you should do next if you want to go at it without our help"

This “person” can be as angry/obnoxious as needed to get paid. And don’t be afraid to pass debts onto collection agencies - or at least threaten this…

You can preserve your nice relationships with customers - after all, what can you do, finance are a separate department, it’s out of your hands.

You just pay me $500 and tell me country and region the company is, and google debt collection agencies for you.

It's the best way I've found to reduce the risk of clients stealing from me through non-payment. If they've already paid a significant portion, they're more likely to pay the rest. And even if they don't, at least I got something.

And don't be shy about using the small claims courts if the dollar amount is low enough to allow it. You don't even have to hire an attorney to do that (although you should have an attorney as a matter of good business practice anyway).

95% of the time it worked well and the milestones gave an opportunity to review progress with the client, perhaps even a change of direction. On several occasions it lead to extensions (more features) or new projects in the future.

As a self employed contractor (cloud infrastructure), who got badly burned in the past, the key was to have deliverables which were self contained but still required the next chunk of work to be of any use in the bigger picture.

The financial loss for me was only the most recent deliverable should the client decide to ghost me. I did happen unfortunately.

From my perspective, I liked working on multiple sequential deliverables rather than one final one. I appreciate that infrastructure might be more flexible than other areas and often contractors only have one final deliverable.