The invoice went out on October 1 and it’s due on the 15th. Today is the 12th. On Thursday you’ll sit with this person for an hour while they say the thing they’ve told nobody else, and you’ll be entirely present for it. The draft in front of you reads “Just a gentle nudge about the invoice, no rush at all.” You’ve read it four times and it still sounds like an apology.
The draft is the problem, rather than you. Almost all of the difficulty comes from one confusion. Two completely different messages get called a payment reminder, and the one that goes out before the due date isn’t a softer version of the one that goes out after it. It’s a different message doing a different job. Written as itself, it’s short, flat and almost invisible. The client pays, and the whole thing is over.
- Before the date, the message is administrative and reads like one. Everything is on schedule, so the message is free to be plain. Amount, date, one way to pay, one line inviting a correction, and stop.
- After the date, assume the invoice is wrong before you assume the client is avoiding you. That’s what the national numbers on unpaid bills look like, and it changes the first sentence you write.
- Escalate specificity, and hold the temperature. Every message after the first adds one fact, and the tone stays where it started.
- If you take the money out of a client’s bank account yourself, rule takes over from manners. A charge that varies in amount carries a ten-day notice period under federal rule, which is a floor rather than a courtesy.
- The invoice and the coaching are two threads, and they stay two threads. In your mailbox and in the room.
What the money is and when it’s due gets settled at the start, and the message that does it is the welcome email that builds trust. Writing the price and the payment schedule for somebody who’s still deciding is the follow-up email after a discovery call. A charge for a session canceled inside your notice window is rescheduling a client without the guilt, and a rate that’s going up belongs with asking for the renewal without pressure. For the general craft of reminding anybody about anything, that’s the polite reminder email. This piece is about the coaching version, where the person you’re chasing is somebody you’ll be alone in a room with on Thursday.
Two messages that share one name
Four things get called a payment reminder, and each one does something different.
The statement of terms. What it costs, when it’s due, how it’s paid, what happens if it runs late. You agree this before the coaching starts and restate it in the first message of the engagement. Everything below assumes it exists. Where it’s missing, the fix sits upstream in the welcome email.
The notice before the date. It restates a fact the client already agreed to, and it lands at the moment they can act on it. Everybody is on time. The ask is the one they already said yes to. A client reads it, pays, and that’s the whole exchange.
The message after the date. Something is unresolved, and this message exists to find out what. It asks a question. Pressure comes later, if it comes at all, and feeling stays out of it.
The receipt. One line saying the money arrived and the account is clear. Most coaches skip it. It’s the cheapest goodwill in the whole sequence, because a receipt is the only way the client who paid on the 14th learns that you noticed.
The common mistake is writing the second in the register of the third. “Just a gentle nudge, no rush” three days before the due date tells a client in good standing that they’re being handled. It also makes the next message harder, because you’ve already spent the apology. The reverse mistake is quieter and it costs more. Write the third in the register of the second, warm and vague, and the client finishes reading with the impression that everything is fine.
One more rule is free and it prevents most of the awkwardness. The money lives in its own thread, with its own subject line. Session recaps, preparation and scheduling questions travel separately. Where that boundary sits from the other side is between-session check-ins that land.
What the reminder before the date is for
You send one so the client stays on time. A client who pays on the date is a client you never chase, and that’s worth more than any wording you could find afterwards.
It does two jobs, and the second is the one that usually goes missing.
It’s where the invoice is. Your client filed the invoice somewhere on October 1 and goes looking for it around the 15th. The reminder is where they find it, so attach the invoice again rather than pointing at it. Scrolling back through two weeks of mail is a real tax, and it’s the moment paying you slides to tomorrow.
It invites the client to tell you something is wrong. This is the sentence most reminders leave out, and it’s the one that turns a silent nonpayment into a two-line email you can act on. “If anything on it looks wrong, tell me and I will fix it” costs eleven words and saves the entire sequence below.
Leave the feeling out. Nothing has happened yet. There’s a fact to state and a route to pay, and that’s the message. An apology, an advance thank-you or an explanation of why you’re sending it all say the same thing, which is that you think you’re asking for a favor. The client picks that up before they read the number.
The profession’s own code sets the deadline for all of this earlier than most coaches do. The first standard in the ICF Code of Ethics, adopted in September 2019 and now carrying rev. 06.25.21, requires the coach to have made sure the client understands the “financial arrangements” of the engagement “prior to or at the initial meeting”. What that standard asks for in full, and how a first message satisfies it, is worked out in the welcome email that builds trust.
Read that deadline against the message in front of you. If your reminder carries an explanation, a justification, or a term the client is meeting for the first time, the discomfort you feel writing it is accurate. You’re doing something months late, in the wrong email. One limit is worth stating plainly, since this piece stands alone. The Code binds “individuals who represent themselves as an ICF Member or ICF Credential-holder”, so it reaches you only if you’re one of them. It’s still the clearest written answer the trade has.
How many go out and when
Four sending moments, and four is the ceiling.
The invoice itself. This is the first notice, and most of the work happens here. Put the due date in the subject line, because that’s the line the client sees when they search for it later. What a subject line is doing before it does anything else is subject lines that get opened.
One reminder before the date. For a client paying personally, three to five days out, on a weekday morning, so the errand has an evening or a weekend in it before the date lands. For anything going through a company, go ten business days out, because the invoice is entering a queue rather than a person’s afternoon. Send one. A second reminder before the date changes your register for you, without you deciding to change it.
The due date itself stays quiet. A message arriving on the morning of the 15th saying today is the day reads as distrust, and the client still has the whole day in front of them. This is the single most common unforced error in the sequence.
The morning after. That’s a different message, and it has its own section below.
Two adjustments. A client on a recurring monthly arrangement with a fixed date hears it once. Then send fewer of these rather than more, because a standing note on the same date each month is wallpaper by the third one. And if you take the money yourself rather than waiting for it, rule answers part of the timing question, which is the section after next. Session reminders run on their own clock and have a different job entirely, which is reminding a coaching client about a session.
The six lines and their order
The whole message runs 60 to 90 words. Past that, the client is watching you be uncomfortable.
The subject line carries the number and the date. “Invoice 214, $X, due Thursday October 15” is findable, and findable is the entire point of this line. “Quick note” and “Following up” both fail it.
The first sentence is the fact. “Invoice 214 for the four September sessions is $X and is due on Thursday, October 15.” One sentence, carrying the amount and the date, with a plain verb in it. Open there, rather than with a greeting the reader has to climb over.
The second line is what it covers. Two or three words. “The four September sessions.” This is what an invoice gets queried on more than anything else, and naming it in the reminder heads the query off.
The third line is one action. One link, or one set of bank details, or one card-on-file confirmation. Pick the best route and give that one. When a payment message offers three routes, the client has a decision to make before they can pay, and the decision is the part that slides.
The fourth line invites the correction. “If anything on it looks wrong, tell me and I will fix it rather than argue about it.” Put it in the reminder before the date, while it’s free, and you hear about the wrong PO number on the 12th rather than on the 30th.
Then sign off and stop. The message ends where the information ends. The paragraph about the coaching, the line about looking forward to Thursday and the hope you’re having a good week all belong to another thread. A client reading a short factual note about money is being treated like an adult with a bank account.
Attach the invoice again. Every time. Your reader should find the thing your email is about inside your email.
The morning after the date passed
Here’s the assumption to start from, and it rests on evidence.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ran its Survey of Consumer Views on Debt between December 2014 and March 2015. It went to 10,876 people, and the results came out in January 2017. It found that “more than half of consumers (53 percent) who were contacted about a debt in collection in the past year indicated that the debt was not theirs, was owed by a family member, or was for the wrong amount.” Broken out, 28 percent said they did not owe it at all, 33 percent said the amount was wrong, and 16 percent said it belonged to a family member.
That survey covers debts already in collection, a later and much rougher stage than an invoice you sent yourself three weeks ago, and the people in it are a different group from your client list. What it does establish is the direction. On the receiving end of an unpaid bill, the common experience is a discrepancy. Something went astray. Something is wrong on the invoice. Something is sitting with somebody else. Your client is far more likely to be in one of those situations than to be dodging you, and writing the first message as though they were dodging you makes the discrepancy harder to report.
So the first message after the date is an offer to find the problem.
Reply in the invoice thread. The number, the amount and the due date are already sitting above whatever you write. That saves you restating them, and it lets the client read the original rather than your version of it.
Say the date passed, once, as a fact. “The 15th has gone by and this one has not landed.” One clause, then move on to the next line.
Name the three possibilities and let them pick. “Usually this is one of three things: it never reached you, something on it is wrong, or it is with somebody else for approval. Tell me which and I will handle it from there.” This is the move that gets replies, because it supplies the words for the awkward answer. It’s the same mechanism that makes a follow-up land at all, which is the follow-up email that gets answered.
That’s the whole message. The consequence, the sessions and the count of days you’ve waited all belong to later messages, if they belong anywhere.
About a week later comes the second one, and the rule for it is the whole discipline of this stage. Add one fact, and hold the temperature exactly where it was. The fact might be the number of days, or the late term in your agreement now applying, or what happens to the next block. A coach whose emails get colder as the balance ages has told the client something about the relationship that’s very hard to take back. Where your writing loses its warmth first when you’re under pressure, and what that costs, is client email that stays warm under deadline pressure.
Then the direct question, written so that the difficult answer is the easy one. “Is this a problem I can help with, or is it stuck somewhere?” Then say you’re stopping, and stop. The general shape of the third and fourth message, past the coaching-specific parts, is following up on an unpaid invoice.
One habit belongs here and nowhere else. Decide in advance whether the money ever gets mentioned in the session, and for almost every practice the answer is that it stays out of the room. One exception is worth having. A balance that has run past a month earns one sentence at the end of a session, rather than at the start. Opening an hour with an invoice spends the hour.
Late fees and the day you apply one
Two things about a late fee, and then the part that’s genuinely different from every other charge in a coaching practice.
It exists only if you agreed it before the work started. A fee invented in the month it’s first needed reads as a reaction, and the client can tell. If your agreement is silent on this, the fix belongs to the next engagement.
The reasoning about how large it can be already sits elsewhere. A charge for breaking an agreement gets tested the same way whether it attaches to a missed session or a missed payment. That gets worked through in rescheduling a client without the guilt, including the test a court applies, which is roughly the test the client applies while reading your email.
What’s different about a late fee is the cap. Interest on an overdue balance is capped by state law, the caps vary from state to state, and a practice with clients in six states has six answers. Take this number from an attorney rather than a template. An attorney in your state reads your agreement in an hour, and that’s the correct amount of effort to spend on it.
The practical position for most coaching practices is smaller than the anxiety around it. A late fee on a solo coaching invoice rarely collects anything and reliably costs something, because it converts a scheduling relationship into a billing one. The consequence that actually works needs no percentage at all: sessions are booked when the block is paid. That’s a term. It’s easy to write, easy to say without heat, and the same for everybody.
If you do apply one, state it in a clause, in the same message that carries the route to clearing the balance, and leave it there. A fee argued over in the email that applies it becomes the subject of the email. A client who wants to take it up will, on a thread of its own.
When you take the money yourself
Plenty of coaching now runs on a card or an ACH authorization. The money leaves the client’s account on a schedule and nobody sends anything. That arrangement is more comfortable right up to the moment the amount changes, and at that point a federal rule has an opinion.
Regulation E covers electronic fund transfers from a consumer’s account. An account means “a demand deposit (checking), savings, or other consumer asset account … established primarily for personal, family, or household purposes”. A preauthorized transfer means “an electronic fund transfer authorized in advance to recur at substantially regular intervals”. A monthly debit from your client’s checking account under a standing authorization is squarely that. A recurring charge to a credit card sits outside it, because a credit card is not a consumer asset account, and your processor’s own rules will govern there instead.
Two provisions matter to a coach.
The authorization has to be in writing and the client gets a copy. 12 CFR 1005.10(b): “Preauthorized electronic fund transfers from a consumer’s account may be authorized only by a writing signed or similarly authenticated by the consumer. The person that obtains the authorization shall provide a copy to the consumer.” A verbal yes on a discovery call falls short of that.
A varying amount carries a ten-day notice. The same section, at paragraph (d)(1), says this. “When a preauthorized electronic fund transfer from the consumer’s account will vary in amount from the previous transfer under the same authorization or from the preauthorized amount, the designated payee or the financial institution shall send the consumer written notice of the amount and date of the transfer at least 10 days before the scheduled date of transfer.” The duty sits on the payee or the bank. In a solo practice, the payee is you.
Read the trigger carefully, because it’s narrower and more useful than it first looks. A flat retainer at the same figure every month stays the same, so the ten-day clock stays off. Coaching amounts move constantly for ordinary reasons. A five-Tuesday month. A session added. A late-cancellation charge. A make-good you decided to give. Each of those is a variation from the previous transfer, and each one is exactly the change a client most wants to hear about before it lands.
Paragraph (d)(2) lets you narrow it by agreement. Tell the client they can have notice of every varying transfer, and from there you “may give the consumer the option of receiving notice only when a transfer falls outside a specified range of amounts or only when a transfer differs from the most recent transfer by more than an agreed-upon amount.”
The practical translation is short, and it makes the email easier rather than harder. Make the ten-day notice your standard reminder for every client on a bank debit, whether the amount moved or stayed put. It removes a monthly judgment call and it’s always safe. It turns the most alarming thing in a coaching relationship, an unexplained withdrawal from somebody’s checking account, into a line the client read a week and a half earlier.
Two housekeeping points go with it. Your payment processor may send something of this kind already, so it’s worth finding out which of you is doing it. And if the arrangement renews itself rather than ending on a date, a separate set of obligations applies to the renewal, which is in asking for the renewal without pressure.
The rules that reach a coach chasing a fee
Most coaches carry a vague worry that chasing a client for money puts them under debt collection law. The general federal answer, for a small business chasing its own invoice, is cleared up in the polite reminder email. Two parts of it land differently on a coach, and both are worth knowing before you write anything.
Coaching sits inside the consumer definition, where most small firms sit outside it. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act concerns itself with a “debt”, which section 1692a defines as “any obligation or alleged obligation of a consumer to pay money arising out of a transaction in which the money, property, insurance, or services which are the subject of the transaction are primarily for personal, family, or household purposes.” Most firms fall outside that because they invoice other businesses. Life coaching, career coaching and most health and relationship coaching are paid for by an individual out of their own money for their own purposes, which is the thing the definition was built to describe. What keeps you outside the Act is the other half of it. The Act reaches those who collect “debts owed or due or asserted to be owed or due another”, and you’re collecting your own, in your own name.
One state removes that half. California’s Rosenthal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act defines a debt collector, at Civil Code section 1788.2, as “any person who, in the ordinary course of business, regularly, on behalf of that person or others, engages in debt collection.” On behalf of that person. And the debt it is talking about arises from a “consumer credit transaction”, defined as “a transaction between a natural person and another person in which property, services, or money is acquired on credit by that natural person from the other person primarily for personal, family, or household purposes.” Sessions delivered in September and invoiced on October 1 sit closer to that description than most coaches assume. Section 1788.17 then imports the federal conduct rules wholesale. It says that “every debt collector collecting or attempting to collect a consumer debt shall comply with the provisions of Sections 1692b to 1692j, inclusive, of, and shall be subject to the remedies in Section 1692k of, Title 15 of the United States Code.” It carves two of them back out, saying that “subsection (11) of Section 1692e and Section 1692g shall not apply to any person specified in paragraphs (A) and (B) of subsection (6) of Section 1692a”, which are the notices written for a creditor’s own officers and employees. Build a policy on that carve-out from a lawyer’s reading of it rather than your own.
Other states have their own versions with their own scope, and a practice with clients in five states has five answers. Treat all of this as background rather than as advice about your agreement or your situation.
Here’s why it’s worth reading anyway. Three of the imported rules are simply good practice, and a coach who follows them is safe in every state, whether or not any of it binds them.
Keep it between you and the client. Section 1692c(b) limits who may be told about the debt at all, to “the consumer, his attorney, a consumer reporting agency if otherwise permitted by law, the creditor, the attorney of the creditor, or the attorney of the debt collector.” In coaching terms, the client hears about the balance and everybody else stays out of it. That covers a spouse, the colleague who referred them, and their employer unless the employer is the payer. Standard 3 of the ICF code is stricter anyway, asking the professional to “maintain the strictest levels of confidentiality with all parties as agreed upon”.
Write only the consequence you’ve decided to carry out. Section 1692e(5) names, among prohibited representations, “the threat to take any action that cannot legally be taken or that is not intended to be taken.” Coaches write “I will have to pass this to collections” with no collection agency and no intention of finding one. Past the legal question, that’s the sentence that ends the relationship. The client now knows one of your sentences was theater, and will wonder which others were.
Watch the hour it lands. Section 1692c(a)(1) assumes, absent knowledge to the contrary, that “the convenient time for communicating with a consumer is after 8 o’clock antemeridian and before 9 o’clock postmeridian, local time at the consumer’s location.” The rule was written for phone calls. The instinct behind it is sound and free to follow: money messages belong in somebody’s working day, rather than in their pocket at 11 at night.
One more finding from the same CFPB survey is worth carrying. It reports that “consumers tend to take a more favorable view of creditors seeking to collect a debt than of debt collectors”. It also reports that people “were more likely to report that debt collectors contacted them too frequently compared with consumers contacted with the same frequency by a creditor.” Same frequency, different reading, and the difference is who’s asking. Staying the person your client knows, writing in your own name, is worth more than any phrasing. The same survey found that 63 percent of people contacted about a debt said they were contacted too often, which is the other half of the same lesson.
When somebody else is paying
An employer-sponsored engagement has three parties, and only two of them are yours to chase. Getting that right matters more than any wording in the message.
Most stuck corporate invoices are stuck for administrative reasons. A missing purchase order number. The wrong legal entity on the invoice. A vendor record that was never created. An approver who changed jobs in August. Every one of those is fixed by a question rather than by pressure, and all of them are cheaper to prevent than to solve.
Ask the three questions at the start. Who do I invoice, what has to appear on it, and who approves it. Two lines in the first message of the engagement, and they save the entire sequence below. That message is the welcome email that builds trust.
Chase the payer rather than the coachee. Your client is a coaching client rather than a collections channel, and turning them into one costs you the thing the engagement is built on. Two narrow exceptions exist. One, they asked to be kept informed. Two, the arrangement itself has gone quiet, and a client who has stopped answering about everything is a different problem with its own timetable, which is the client who went dark.
Copy the coachee once, into a message that’s entirely about the invoice. One line to accounts payable, with the coachee copied, saying the invoice is outstanding and asking what it needs. It’s visible, it reads as an administrative question, and it usually moves within a day, because the coachee can walk down a corridor that you can’t.
Say only what the finance team needs. That sessions took place on these dates, for this many hours, at this rate. That’s the whole message, and the person stays out of it. Standard 3 of the code is the floor here. The consumer statutes above are mostly beside the point in this case, since a company buying coaching is acquiring services for business purposes rather than personal, family or household ones.
Budgets close on somebody else’s calendar. If the money moves quarterly or annually, an unpaid October invoice can be a fiscal-year problem rather than a payment problem, and the same calendar governs whether there’s a next block at all. What can and cannot be said to each audience is in asking for the renewal without pressure.
Pausing the work, and saying so
Sooner or later the question is whether you coach somebody who hasn’t paid. One answer works, and two are closed to you.
The hour stays the hour. Standard 13 of the code asks the professional to “assure consistent quality of coaching regardless of the amount or form of agreed compensation in any relationship”. That’s easy to agree with in the abstract, and hard on a Thursday when you’ve sent three emails about the same invoice. And the resentment comes into the room with you, so the work is to name it to yourself. Standard 17 asks the professional to recognize any circumstance “that may impair, conflict with or interfere with my coaching performance”, and being owed four figures by the person sitting in front of you is one of those. Noticing it is the standard being met. The same standard read the other way round, when it’s you who keeps moving sessions, is in rescheduling a client without the guilt.
What you can do is stop, if you said in advance that you would. Standard 9 asks the professional to “respect all parties’ right to terminate the coaching relationship at any point for any reason during the coaching process subject to the provisions of the agreement.” Subject to the provisions of the agreement is the operative phrase, and it points in both directions. A pause written down before the engagement began is a term. The same pause improvised in month four is a penalty, and the client experiences it as one.
So write it once, in the plainest form there is: sessions are scheduled when the block is paid. Then, if you ever have to use it, four rules make it survivable.
Say it a week ahead. A canceled session with an explanation attached is a punishment. A message sent a week ahead, saying the next one gets booked once the balance clears, is an arrangement.
Send it in the invoice thread. The coaching thread stays clear, and so does the day of a session.
Give a date and a single route back. “Nothing is booked past November 6. The moment this clears I’ll put the remaining four back in, same hour.”
Spell out what stays true. That the gap is free, that the engagement carries on, that their slot is held until a stated date. Clients assume the worst version of an ambiguous pause and act on the assumption.
Then the genuine hardship case, which is different and reasonably common. A client whose circumstances changed needs two options with dates in them, offered as equals, rather than a payment plan invented on the spot at 10 at night. One, a schedule for the balance. Two, a clean end, with the balance settled at whatever is fair. Extending indefinite credit to somebody who’s embarrassed loses you the money and the client, in that order. Saying the harder of those two things kindly is the same craft pointed elsewhere, which is how to say no in an email.
Nine you can send
Invoice numbers, figures and dates stand in for yours. Time zones are spelled out on purpose, since a message about money should be the easiest one in the inbox to read.
One. The reminder before the date, client paying personally.
Subject: Invoice 214, $X, due Thursday October 15
Hi Ellis,
Invoice 214 covers the four September sessions. It’s $X and it’s due on Thursday, October 15. It’s attached again here so you don’t have to go looking.
The payment link is below, and the bank details are on the invoice if that’s easier.
If anything on it looks wrong, tell me and I will fix it rather than argue about it.
Nadia
Two. An installment on a package, agreed at the start.
Subject: Second of three, $X, due October 20
Hi Corinne,
The second of the three payments for the January block is $X, due Tuesday, October 20. Invoice 218 attached.
That leaves one more on January 20 at the same figure, and then nothing further for this engagement.
Same link as last time. Say the word if the date is awkward this month and I’ll move it.
Nadia
Three. The ten-day notice before a varying automatic charge.
Subject: December charge is $X, on the 1st
Hi Hasan,
A plain note ahead of the automatic payment on Tuesday, December 1. The amount is $X rather than the usual figure, because December has five Tuesdays in it and there are five sessions.
Nothing is needed from you. It comes off the account on file that morning.
If you’d rather I moved the fifth session to January and kept the amount where it usually is, tell me by Friday and I’ll do that instead.
Nadia
Four. The morning after the date.
Subject: Re: Invoice 214, $X, due Thursday October 15
Hi Ellis,
The 15th has gone by and this one hasn’t landed at my end.
Usually that’s one of three things: it never reached you, something on it is wrong, or it’s sitting with somebody else. Tell me which and I’ll deal with it from there.
Invoice attached again, and the link is below.
Nadia
Five. A week later, adding one fact.
Subject: Re: Invoice 214, $X, due Thursday October 15
Hi Ellis,
Still nothing on invoice 214, which is eight days past its date now.
One thing worth flagging rather than leaving to be discovered: under the agreement, the November sessions get booked once the block is settled, so I haven’t put them in yet. Nothing has been canceled and your Tuesday is held.
If the invoice is the problem, say so and I’ll reissue it however you need it.
Nadia
Six. A month past due, the direct question.
Subject: Invoice 214, and what would help
Hi Ellis,
Invoice 214 is a month past due and I haven’t heard back, so I’d rather ask directly than send a fourth reminder.
Is this a problem I can help with, or is it stuck somewhere administrative? Both are real answers and either one is more useful to me than an open thread.
If it’s the first, I’d rather set up a schedule with dates in it than have this sit. If it’s the second, tell me what the invoice is missing.
Nadia
Seven. The client says money is tight.
Subject: Two ways to do this
Hi Junie,
Thank you for telling me, and it doesn’t change anything about how I think of the work.
Two options, and neither is the right answer. One: $X on November 1 and $X on December 1, and everything carries on as it is. Two: we close the engagement at the end of October, settle at $X for the sessions taken, and leave the door open for whenever it makes sense again.
Tell me which, or tell me a third thing that works better and I’ll look at it seriously.
Nadia
Eight. To the payer, with the coachee copied once.
Subject: Invoice 221, purchase order 4472, outstanding since September 30
Hello,
Invoice 221 for $X was issued on August 31 against purchase order 4472 and was due on September 30. It hasn’t been paid and I haven’t had a query on it.
The invoice covers six coaching sessions delivered between July 8 and September 24.
Could you tell me whether it’s in the queue, or whether something on it needs correcting? I’ll reissue it the same day.
Wes, copied here so you know where it stands. Nothing is needed from you.
Nadia
Nine. The pause, sent before anything is canceled.
Subject: Invoice 214, and the November dates
Hi Ellis,
I want to tell you this a week ahead rather than on the day.
The agreement books sessions once the block is settled, so I haven’t put the four November dates in the calendar yet. Nothing is canceled, your Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. ET is held through November, and there’s no charge for the gap.
The moment invoice 214 clears I’ll send all four invitations that afternoon.
If the invoice is wrong or the timing is the problem, tell me today and we’ll do something else.
Nadia
Six things run through all nine. Every one carries a date. Every one states the amount rather than gesturing at it. Every one leaves an opening to say something is wrong. Every one arrives without an apology for arriving. Every one leaves the coaching and the client’s week alone. And every consequence in them is one the writer had already decided to carry out.
The tenth message is the one most coaches skip. “That came through this morning, thank you, and you’re clear until January.” One line, sent the day the money lands, and it closes the loop the way none of the others can.
What does not belong in one
The word just, and the word quick. Both ask permission to have sent the message. You’re allowed to send it.
An apology. “Sorry to chase”, “sorry to be a pain”, “apologies for the admin”. An invoice reminder before its due date is a routine piece of admin, and calling it an imposition persuades the reader that it is one.
Thanks in advance. It thanks somebody for something they have yet to do, which is a small piece of pressure wearing a nice hat.
Anything about your own finances. Your quarter, your own bills, the three of these you’ve had this month. It asks the client to solve a problem that’s yours.
The coaching. The recap, the reference to what they said on Tuesday, the line about looking forward to Thursday: all of that belongs to the other thread. Warmth reads as a lever here, and here alone, which is the one place your instinct about it leads you wrong.
Their excuse, written for them. “I know how busy things have been.” The reason it’s unpaid is still unknown to you, you’ve just told them you’ve settled on one, and the true answer now has nowhere to go.
A consequence you’re still undecided about. Covered above, and it’s the one that does lasting damage.
A second ask. A renewal, a testimonial, a referral, a rescheduling question. Each is fine, each on its own day, once the balance is clear.
Two amounts. One invoice per message. A message carrying two invoices gets one of them paid.
Emoji, and humor about money. Both read as nervousness, and both are the first thing to look wrong when the message reaches a bookkeeper.
Gentle, and friendly, in front of reminder. The argument for why those two words do the opposite of what they’re for is in the polite reminder email, and it holds here.
What the wording will not do
Fix a price the client never really agreed to. If the figure is a surprise, the conversation you’re actually in is about the agreement rather than the invoice.
Route an invoice that cannot be routed. A missing purchase order number, the wrong entity, an absent vendor record. Those are data problems, and they get fixed with data rather than with rewriting.
Produce money that does not exist. A client whose situation changed needs options with dates in them, and a third reminder is the wrong instrument however well it’s worded.
Beat the payer’s cycle. A company that pays on 45 days pays on 45 days. A reminder sent on day 20 changes only how the person reading it feels about you. Send it on day 40, once, to the right address.
Rescue an engagement that ended in the client’s mind in month three. An unpaid invoice is quite often the last symptom rather than the first. Where that drift starts, and what it looks like months before the invoice does, is when a client keeps showing up and has already gone.
Settle your own discomfort about being owed. If the message is hard to write because you feel apologetic for having a rate, the fix sits outside the email. Say the number out loud to somebody other than the client, and notice how that goes.
Substitute for terms you never wrote down. An agreement missing a payment schedule, a late term and a rule about when sessions get booked leaves every one of these messages doing work it can’t do. That gets fixed at the start of the next engagement, and the message that does it is the welcome.
The dates that should not be yours to hold
The judgment above stays with you. What can be handed over is the part that quietly eats a Friday: holding eleven due dates in your head, and typing the same four lines for the ninth time this quarter.
Point sits over the mailbox you already have at Google or Microsoft 365, as the client you read and write in. You keep your address and your mail stays where it is, so your clients see exactly what they saw before.
The dates come first, because this whole sequence is made of dates that arrive weeks after you thought about them. Tell Point in ordinary words to bring invoice 214 back on the 12th, and again on the 16th if nothing has come in. The thread surfaces on the 12th. The 19th is when you’d have remembered. Where a thing you pushed to later actually goes is snoozed, and the thread that comes back. The ten-day notice before a varying charge is the same shape, set once against the date the charge runs. A message that asks something of you turns into a dated item you never typed out. The invoice you sent and heard nothing back about is carried as a debt against a name, which is unanswered emails, and the threads that come back.
Then the drafting. A reminder comes back already written in your manner, carrying the name, the invoice number, the amount and the date, which is most of what these messages are. The judgment stays yours: whether this is the week to add the fact about November, and whether the pause is fair. The rules you’ve decided on sit as plain sentences, yours to read and to change, so every payment message goes out clear of an apology, clear of the coaching, and with the correction line in it. Every kind of work has its own setting for how far Point goes on its own, and out of the box they all sit at review. Anything with a figure in it is the last kind you’d ever move off that. Each thing done for you is entered as it happens in the activity log, and undo works back down that list as far as anything can. Once a message is in your client’s mailbox, no product retrieves it.
Then the conversation a hard one turns into. When a client asks to talk about the balance, Point runs the back-and-forth that settles a time, so one hard message stays one message rather than six on top of the six you already sent.
The money itself stays elsewhere. Point holds the date, the thread, the draft and the record of what was sent. Invoices, payments, ledgers and balances belong to an invoicing tool or a coaching platform, which are good at exactly that, and the two jobs are genuinely different. So what knows that invoice 214 is outstanding is the thread you’re looking at and the reminder you set. Tracking the money side of what you’re owed across a whole client list is keeping track of what you are owed. For the question underneath all of this, which is how much of a client’s private mail an assistant reads in order to be useful, the unhedged answer is what Point can see, and what it cannot. Point for coaches makes the case in this trade’s own terms, the benefits page has everything beyond invoices, and the other trades this was built for hit the same week from different angles.
Common questions
How do I write a polite reminder for an upcoming payment?
Make it administrative rather than warm. Everything is on schedule, and warmth is what makes it read as a nudge. Subject line with the invoice number, the amount and the due date. First sentence stating all three as a fact. One line saying what it covers, one route to pay, and one line inviting a correction: if anything looks wrong, tell me and I will fix it. Attach the invoice again so nobody has to go looking. Sixty to ninety words, and the apology, the advance thanks and the coaching all stay out.
When should I send a payment reminder before the due date?
Three to five days out for a client paying personally, in the morning on a weekday, so the errand has an evening in it before the date. Ten business days out for anything going through a company, because it’s entering a queue rather than somebody’s afternoon. Send one reminder. Leave the due date itself alone, since a message that morning reads as distrust while the client still has the day. If you debit a client’s bank account and the amount has changed, the timing is partly set for you: federal rule requires written notice of the amount and date at least 10 days ahead.
What should the subject line say?
The invoice number, the amount and the due date, in that order. “Invoice 214, $X, due Thursday October 15” looks blunt on the page and it’s the version that works. Your client will search for this thread three weeks later, and those are the words they’ll search for. Everything else, including “quick note” and “following up”, makes the message unfindable at the moment it matters most, which is the moment the client finally sits down to pay things.
What do I write the day after a coaching client misses a payment?
Reply in the invoice thread rather than starting a new one, so the amount and the date sit above whatever you write. State that the date passed, once, as a clause. Then name the three things it usually is, and let the client pick: it never reached them, something on it is wrong, or it is with somebody else for approval. Then stop there. The consequence, the count of days you’ve waited and the sessions all belong to later messages. The point of this one is to find the problem.
Should I bring up an unpaid invoice in the coaching session?
Almost never, and decide it once rather than each time. Opening an hour with an invoice spends the hour, and the client hears the rest of the session through it. The single exception worth having is a balance that has run past a month with no reply at all. Then it’s one sentence at the end, and it points at the thread rather than opening the subject. The ethics code asks for consistent quality of coaching regardless of the compensation, which is only possible with the money out of the room.
Can I charge a coaching client a late fee?
Only if it was a term of the agreement before the engagement started, and even then it’s usually the wrong tool for a solo practice. Interest on an overdue balance is capped by state law, the caps differ, and this is a question for an attorney in your state rather than a template. The consequence that actually works needs no percentage and no arithmetic: sessions are booked when the block is paid. It’s easy to state without heat, it’s the same for every client, and it keeps a coaching relationship a coaching relationship.
Do I have to give notice before I charge a client’s card or bank account?
If the money comes out of a checking or savings account on a recurring authorization, and the amount differs from last time or from the amount authorized, then yes. Regulation E requires the payee or the financial institution to send written notice of the amount and date at least 10 days before the transfer. The authorization itself has to be in writing, with a copy given to the client. A flat retainer that stays the same leaves the notice off, and a credit card sits outside Regulation E entirely. The workable habit is to send the notice every month regardless, which removes the judgment call and turns an unexplained withdrawal into something the client read ten days earlier.
Am I allowed to chase a coaching client for money?
Yes, and the federal debt collection rules most people worry about generally leave a coach collecting their own fee in their own name alone. What’s unusual about coaching is the escape route. Most small firms rely on the invoice being business to business, and a client paying personally for their own coaching fits the statutory description of a consumer debt exactly. States are separate, and California’s Rosenthal Act reaches anyone who regularly engages in debt collection on their own behalf. Three rules are worth following either way. Keep the balance between you and the client, write only the consequences you’ve decided to carry out, and keep money messages inside the working day.
Should I stop coaching a client who has not paid?
You can, if you said in advance that you would. The code asks the coach to respect the right to terminate subject to the provisions of the agreement, and that phrase decides it. A pause written down before the engagement is a term. The same pause improvised in month four is a penalty, and it lands as one. What stays constant either way is the hour itself, because consistent quality regardless of compensation is an explicit standard. Send the pause a week ahead, in the invoice thread, with a date, a held slot and one action that reverses it.
The employer is paying and the invoice is stuck. What now?
Chase the payer rather than the person you coach. Most stuck corporate invoices are missing a purchase order number, addressed to the wrong entity, or sitting with somebody who changed jobs, and all three are fixed by a question rather than by pressure. Send one line to accounts payable asking what the invoice needs. Copy the coachee once, with an explicit note that nothing is required from them. Say only what the finance team needs to know: dates, hours, rate. The content of the sessions stays with you. And ask the three questions at the start of the engagement, which is where this gets prevented.
Can I automate payment reminders?
The reminder before the date, yes, and it’s the best candidate in a coaching practice for running with very little of you in it, because it’s entirely factual and identical every month. The message after the date is a different matter. It carries a judgment about what to add and what to leave out, and it lands on somebody whose reason for holding the payment is still unknown to you. Draft it automatically, read it before it goes, and keep any sequence from sending on its own. A client who receives a third automated chase for an invoice they already told you was wrong has learned something about the practice that no later email corrects.
The short version
A payment reminder is easy to write badly, because two different messages share the name. The one before the due date is administrative. Invoice number, amount, date, one route to pay, one line inviting a correction. Sixty to ninety words, clear of an apology, clear of advance thanks, clear of the coaching. Send one, three to five days ahead for an individual and ten business days ahead through a company, and leave the day itself quiet.
The one after the date starts from a different assumption. On the receiving end of an unpaid bill, the common experience is a discrepancy rather than a refusal, and writing as though the client were dodging you makes the discrepancy harder to report. Reply in the invoice thread, name the three things it usually is, and let them pick. Then add one fact per message, hold the temperature steady, and stop when you’ve asked the direct question.
Then the parts that rule decides. If you debit a client’s bank account for an amount that varies, written notice of the amount and date goes out at least 10 days ahead, and the authorization is in writing with a copy to the client. If you’re in California, a statute reaches you that most small firms chasing their own invoices sit outside. Everywhere, three rules hold whether or not they bind you. Keep the balance between you and the client. Write only the consequences you’ve decided to carry out. And keep money out of somebody’s evening.
How much of this you need is set by how you sell. A coaching practice invoicing individuals per block gets one clean date per client per month, and the whole job is the reminder before it. An automatic monthly charge moves the work upstream into a notice, and the chasing largely disappears. An employer-sponsored engagement is a routing problem wearing a payment problem’s clothes, and the payer is the one who solves it. The constant across all three is that the invoice and the coaching are two threads. Tell a client plainly what’s owed, when, and how to say it’s wrong, and you’ll have nothing to chase.