An unpaid invoice is usually stuck somewhere rather than refused. So the first message after the due date is there to find out where. Send it the morning after, as a reply in the invoice thread. Name the three or four things that normally go wrong, and ask which of them it is. Then roughly one message a week, each carrying a new fact while the tone stays exactly where it started. Somewhere around day 45 you decide about stopping.
That’s a different shape from every other follow-up you send, and there’s one reason for it. A due date was agreed in writing before the work started. So the schedule is arithmetic rather than a guess at what’s polite. The open question is what happened to a document you already delivered.
- Most of what holds an invoice up is administrative, and invisible from where you sit. A purchase order number you were never given. A vendor record that was never set up. An approver who changed jobs in August.
- The person who owes you the money and the person who can pay it are usually two different people. The second one has never read your engagement letter.
- A new fact moves an invoice along. A firmer tone leaves it exactly where it was. Coldness accumulated over four messages is the part of this you can’t take back.
- Before you write anything, check the invoice against what a payables system actually requires. An invoice missing a required field isn’t late. It never started.
- Writing it off buys you less than you’d think. On the cash basis the income was never recognized, so there’s nothing to deduct.
Several neighboring questions are settled elsewhere and taken as read here. The general interval for a quiet email, and why it’s shorter than instinct says, is how long to wait before following up, which names money as the case that runs on its own clock. Whether a run of messages has started to read badly is following up without nagging. Where the whole list of what you’re owed lives is tracking what you are owed. A client who has gone quiet about everything, money included, is a different problem, and that one is chasing a client who will not reply. The wording craft of a reminder in general is the polite reminder email, which also covers the federal debt collection rules most small firms wrongly believe constrain them. And if you invoice individuals for services they buy for themselves, a set of consumer rules reaches you that stops short of a firm billing other businesses: handling an upcoming payment reminder gracefully works that through.
Six reasons an invoice sits, and only one of them is refusal
The message you feel like writing is aimed at a client who’s refusing to pay you. That client exists, and they’re uncommon. Six situations produce the same silence, and each one wants a different message.
It never reached anybody who pays things. You sent it to the person you talk to, and that person forwards mail when they remember. The tell is that every kind of acknowledgment is missing, down to a note saying it had been passed on. The second tell is that you’d struggle to name the mailbox invoices are supposed to go to.
It was received and rejected. Something on it failed the payables check. A missing purchase order number, the wrong legal entity, a description that disagrees with the contract line. Or a W-9 the payer is still waiting for, or banking details that disagree with the vendor record. Commercial payers are free to stay quiet about it, and often do, so a rejected invoice and an ignored invoice look identical from your desk.
It is in a queue that is longer than your terms. Plenty of companies pay on a cycle rather than on a date. A check run on the 10th and the 25th, or a weekly ACH batch that closes on Wednesday morning. An invoice approved on the 11th is early for the next run, and it sits there until that run goes out. A reminder leaves it exactly where it is.
It is waiting for an approval nobody inside the company has chased. Your invoice sits in a queue belonging to somebody who has 40 other things in it. Yours ranks alongside the rest of them. The tell is a payables clerk who answers you promptly and cheerfully and has no power to move it.
There is a disagreement you have not been told about. The hours look higher than expected. A deliverable is thought to be outstanding. The scope change was verbal. Find this one fast. It’s the only reason on the list that gets more expensive the longer it stays unspoken.
They cannot pay. Real, and less common than the anxiety around it suggests. The tell usually showed up earlier than the invoice. A delayed retainer, a request to move a payment date, or a sudden interest in the scope of next quarter’s work.
Which of the six applies is knowable. The fastest way to know is to ask in a form that costs the reader a few seconds to answer. That’s what the first message after the due date is for.
The audience this happens to most is the one reading this. The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2024 Report on Payments draws on the 2023 Small Business Credit Survey of firms with fewer than 500 employees. It found that “approximately 80% of firms experience payments-related challenges”. It also found that firms “in professional services and real estate and in manufacturing are more likely than those in other industries to accept payment after delivery of the product or service” and “more likely to accept checks and ACH as forms of payment and to report that slow-paying customers are a challenge” (checked September 6, 2026). Billing after the work is done is what produces this problem. Billing after the work is done is also how professional services is sold.
Ten things that make an invoice payable
Before you write a follow-up, read your own invoice the way a payables clerk would. There’s a written standard for this, and the useful thing about it is that it’s written down at all. Commercial payables departments apply a similar test and keep it to themselves.
Federal agencies buy services from small firms constantly, and the rule tells them exactly what counts. Under 5 CFR 1315.9, “the following correct information constitutes a proper invoice and is required as payment documentation”:
- the name of the vendor
- the invoice date
- the contract number or other authorization for delivery of the services
- the vendor invoice or account number
- a description with the price and quantity of what was rendered
- the shipping and payment terms
- the Taxpayer Identifying Number
- banking information
- a contact name and telephone number
- any other substantiating documentation the contract requires
Two of those are the ones small firms most often get wrong. The first is the authorization number, which in commercial terms is the purchase order or the engagement reference. The second is the description matching the contract. An invoice that says “professional services rendered, $8,400” leaves a clerk with nothing to tie to an approved commitment. So it goes to somebody’s queue for interpretation and stays there.
The consequence is spelled out for federal payers and merely implied for everybody else. 5 CFR 1315.4 says that “when an invoice is determined to be improper, the agency shall return the invoice to the vendor as soon as practicable after receipt, but no later than 7 days after receipt”, identifying “all defects that prevent payment”. A commercial payer carries that duty to nobody. Your defective invoice just stops, silently.
The same section makes a second point that changes your arithmetic. The payment clock “shall begin on the date of receipt of a proper invoice”. Receipt is deemed to be the later of actual receipt and “the seventh day after the date on which the property is actually delivered or performance of the services is actually completed”. So day zero sits later than the day you click send, and a defective invoice has a day zero still ahead of it. Net 30 from an invoice that was returned on the 8th is net 30 from whenever you reissue it.
Ten minutes with this list before your first follow-up is worth more than the follow-up. If something is missing, the message you send is a corrected invoice with one line of explanation. That one usually pays.
The dates your terms already set
For a general email you have to estimate an interval, and the reasoning behind that estimate is in how long to wait before following up. Money removes the estimate. A date exists, both of you agreed to it, and everything after it is counting.
A short note going out before the due date belongs to a different job, and it’s covered in handling an upcoming payment reminder gracefully. This piece starts the morning after.
Day one, the morning after the due date. A reply in the invoice thread, stating that the date passed and naming the possibilities. Diagnosis is its whole job. Leave out the consequence, your feelings about it, and the work itself.
Day eight. One added fact, and only one. How many days it has run. Or a term in the letter that has now started to bite. Or the effect on work you’ve scheduled for next month. Pick whichever is true and leave the tone exactly where it was.
Day fifteen. Contact the payer directly if you haven’t already, and say so in the thread with your usual contact rather than around them. By now the question is where in the process the invoice has reached, rather than whether anybody saw it.
Day thirty. The direct question, carrying a decision. Something has gone wrong that four reminders left buried. The useful message asks which of two things is true, and states what you’ll do in each case.
Day forty-five to sixty. The stop. What you’re doing, what you’ve completed, what’s now theirs to deal with, and what happens next. That message is a statement rather than a request. Its shape, along with the records questions that come with ending an engagement, is in chasing a client who will not reply.
Two adjustments make more difference than the dates themselves.
The first is the payment run. Ask, once, in ordinary words: which run does this go into, and when does that run close. A company paying twice a month pays on its own two dates, whatever you send on the 11th. Knowing the answer converts a month of vague chasing into two dates you can put in your own calendar. Payables clerks welcome the question, because it’s the one they wish vendors would ask.
The second is that the sequence stops the moment you learn something. A client who tells you the invoice is in the November 25 run has answered you. Any message sent before the 26th is a message about your nerves rather than about the money. The dates above are what happens while you’re still in the dark, which is the only situation that needs a schedule.
Who can actually pay you
An unpaid commercial invoice usually involves four people, and writing to the wrong one produces sympathy rather than money.
The person you work with. They can tell you where the invoice is, and they can walk down a corridor you can’t. Paying it sits outside what they can do, and in many companies the payables queue is hidden from them too. Asking them for payment puts them in the position of chasing their own colleagues on your behalf. They’ll do that once, willingly, and twice, resentfully.
Accounts payable. They can pay it. They can tell you within a minute whether it exists in their system, which is the single most valuable fact available to you. Whether the work was worth what you charged is somebody else’s call. Address them plainly and factually and they’re usually the most responsive party in the whole chain.
The approver. A budget holder who has to click something. Often the invoice is news to them, and often the entire delay is theirs. Their email address is the one you’re missing, which is why the message to accounts payable asks who the approver is rather than asking them to hurry.
The person who signed the engagement. They can settle a disagreement about the amount, and they can decide to pay you out of turn. Reaching them is the last move rather than the loudest one. Say in the thread that you’re going to, then do it, so it arrives as something already announced.
The move that works more often than any wording is one message to accounts payable with your usual contact copied. Write it so your contact only has to read it. It’s visible, it keeps every name out of trouble, and it puts the question in front of the one person who can answer it factually.
Two limits on going around somebody. Where you prepare tax returns, disclosing anything about a client’s affairs to a person outside the engagement runs into section 7216, and that line is set out in chasing a client who will not reply. And if your client is a sole proprietor, all four people above are one person. The routing diagnosis collapses, and two possibilities remain rather than six: it was forgotten, or it can’t be paid. That’s a much shorter sequence, and it should reach the direct question faster.
Six you can send
Figures, dates and invoice numbers stand in for yours. Every one of these goes in the invoice thread unless it says otherwise. That way the number, the amount and the due date sit above whatever you write, and both of you can read them off the screen.
One. The morning after the date.
Subject: Re: Invoice 3081, $6,200, due October 15
Hi Priya,
The 15th has gone by and invoice 3081 hasn’t come through at our end.
In my experience that’s almost always one of four things: it never reached your payables team, something on it needs correcting before it can be processed, it’s waiting on an approval, or it’s queued for the next payment run. Say which one and I’ll take it from there.
The invoice is attached again, and I’m happy to reissue it in whatever form works.
Dan
Two. Day eight, adding one fact.
Subject: Re: Invoice 3081, $6,200, due October 15
Hi Priya,
Still nothing on invoice 3081, now eight days past its date.
One thing worth saying now rather than later: the November fieldwork is booked for the week of the 10th, and under our letter that block gets scheduled once the October invoice is settled. Nothing has been moved and I’m not moving it this week.
If it would help, send me the name of the mailbox invoices should go to and I’ll submit it there directly.
Dan
Three. To accounts payable, with your contact copied.
Subject: Invoice 3081, PO 88-4412, due October 15, outstanding
Hello,
Invoice 3081 for $6,200 was issued on September 30 against purchase order 88-4412 and was due on October 15. It covers the September interim review work.
Three questions, and any one of them helps: is the invoice in your system, is anything on it preventing processing, and which payment run is it in.
If it needs reissuing in a different format or against a different entity, tell me what you need and I’ll send a corrected copy the same day.
Priya, copied so you know where this stands. Nothing is needed from you.
Dan
Four. When they name a run, and it passes.
Subject: Re: Invoice 3081, PO 88-4412
Hello,
Thanks for confirming on the 22nd that invoice 3081 was in the run closing November 5. It hasn’t arrived, so I assume something changed after that.
Could you tell me whether it dropped out of the run, and what it would take to get it into the next one.
Dan
Five. Day thirty, the direct question.
Subject: Invoice 3081, and where we go from here
Hi Priya,
Invoice 3081 is a month past its date and I’d rather ask directly than send a fifth reminder.
Two possibilities, and both are ordinary. Either it’s stuck somewhere administrative, in which case tell me what it needs and I’ll fix it today. Or there’s a question about the invoice itself that nobody has raised with me, in which case I’d genuinely rather hear it now than discover it in January.
If it is neither and the timing is the problem, say so and we’ll agree dates that work.
Dan
Six. The stop, sent before anything is withdrawn.
Subject: Invoice 3081, and the November work
Hi Priya,
Sending this now rather than on Friday, so nothing about it is a surprise.
Invoice 3081 has been outstanding since October 15 and I haven’t had a reply since the 22nd. I’m releasing the week of November 10 as of Friday. Nothing else changes, your file stays exactly where it is, and I’m not invoicing for anything further.
The moment 3081 clears I’ll find you dates in December. If the invoice is wrong, or the amount is the problem, tell me today and we’ll do something else instead.
Dan
Four things run through all six. Every one carries dates and a figure rather than gesturing at them. Every one leaves an opening to say that something is wrong. Every one keeps your feelings about the delay to yourself. And every consequence in them is one you’d already decided to carry out.
There’s a seventh, and it’s the one people skip. One line, sent the day the money lands: that came through this morning, thank you, and the account is clear. It costs eight seconds. It’s the only evidence the payer has that their effort registered. The general case for that habit, and why it makes your next chase credible, is in following up without nagging.
When the payer is a federal agency
Consulting and accounting work sold to a federal agency runs on a published timetable, which turns most of the judgment above into arithmetic. Learn it precisely, because the usual chase reads as ignorance in this setting.
The default due date, where the contract is silent, is “30 days after the start of the payment period” (5 CFR 1315.4). That period begins “on the date of receipt of a proper invoice”. Receipt is deemed to be the later of actual receipt and the seventh day after performance is completed, unless the agency accepted earlier or the contract sets a longer acceptance window. So the date to count from is rarely the date on your invoice.
Interest arrives on its own. The same section says that “when payments are made after the due date, interest will be paid automatically”, and 31 U.S.C. 3902 puts it beyond doubt. A penalty of $1.00 or more “shall be paid without regard to whether the business concern has requested payment of such penalty”. So you can leave it alone. A message demanding it makes you look like somebody who skipped the rule that already protects you.
The defect rule is the one to use. The agency must return an improper invoice within 7 days with all defects identified, so silence past that window tells you something. Either your invoice was accepted as proper, in which case the clock is running and you can name the date. Or the notification itself was late, and section 1315.4 reduces the payment window accordingly.
So the useful message to a federal payer is one sentence establishing which date everybody is working from.
Could you confirm the date invoice 3081 was received as a proper invoice, so I have the right due date at my end.
State and local government payers are governed by their own statutes rather than by any of this, and those vary considerably from one state to the next. A commercial payer is governed by your contract alone. Keep the federal timetable out of both of those conversations.
Stopping, and what a write-off is really worth
Two facts sit on either side of this decision, and most people learn them late.
The first is that the money matters more than the annoyance suggests. The JPMorgan Chase Institute looked at 470 million transactions from 597,000 small businesses between February and October 2015. It reported in September 2016 that “the median small business holds 27 cash buffer days in reserve”. A cash buffer day is “the number of days of cash outflows a business could pay out of its cash balance were its inflows to stop”. Those are Chase business banking customers rather than a random sample, and the period is a decade old, so read the figure as scale rather than as your number. The scale is the point. A client who is 45 days past your terms has quietly asked you to fund them for longer than the median firm could survive with no income at all.
The second is that writing it off delivers less relief than people imagine. The Internal Revenue Service is direct about it. It says “if you’re a cash method taxpayer (most individuals are), you generally can’t take a bad debt deduction for unpaid salaries, wages, rents, fees, interests, dividends, and similar items of taxable income”. Business bad debts are deductible “only if the amount you were owed is included in your gross income in the current or prior year” (checked September 6, 2026). The regulation says the same thing more plainly. Under 26 CFR 1.166-1(e), worthless debts from unpaid fees “shall not be allowed as a deduction under section 166 unless the income such items represent has been included in the return of income”.
For a cash-basis practice, which most small firms are, an unpaid invoice produces no deduction at all. The income was never recognized, so there’s nothing to write off. You simply didn’t get paid, and the loss is the hours. A firm on the accrual basis stands somewhere else, because the fee was already in income, and the deduction is real. Which one you are changes the arithmetic of chasing a $6,200 invoice into month four. It’s the single most common misunderstanding among people who are otherwise good at this. None of the above is advice about your return.
One detail is worth carrying whichever basis you use. The IRS says a deduction may be taken “only in the year the debt becomes worthless”. It adds that “you don’t have to wait until a debt is due to determine that it’s worthless”. To show worthlessness, “you must establish that you’ve taken reasonable steps to collect the debt”, and “it’s not necessary to go to court if you can show that a judgment from the court would be uncollectible”. Reasonable steps have to be evidenced. That’s the practical reason to keep the dated record of every message, call and letter. The record costs seconds each time, and it’s the only version of events that survives a year.
Past the point of stopping there are three separate decisions, and each one stands on its own.
Hand it to a collection agency. This changes which rules apply. An agency collecting a debt owed to somebody else is squarely inside the federal debt collection statute in a way you were outside. The reasoning is in the polite reminder email. It also ends the relationship, permanently, so it’s a decision about whether you want the client back.
Have an attorney send a demand letter. Cheaper than people expect, and effective on a payer who’s stalling rather than broke. It’s a formal act, and it’ll be read as one.
Small claims. Filing limits, procedure and the time you have to bring a claim at all vary by state, so your own state is the one to check. The paperwork you need is the same paperwork that makes an invoice payable in the first place. The engagement letter, the invoice, the delivery evidence and your dated record of asking.
What gets fixed before the invoice goes out
Almost everything above is downstream of five decisions taken earlier. Firms that make them spend very little of the year on this.
Set up as a vendor in week one. W-9, the payables email address, the purchase order or engagement reference, the name of the approver, and the payment run cadence. Three lines in the kickoff message and the four most common reasons an invoice stops are gone. Doing it in week six, when you’re already owed money, is a harder conversation and a slower one.
Put the payment terms in the engagement letter as a date rather than a mood. Net 30 from the invoice date is a term. Payable on receipt is a mood, and payable promptly is a vaguer one. What else the letter should carry, and why the version written before anybody has gone quiet is the one that holds, is what an engagement letter should carry.
Bill smaller and sooner. A consultancy invoicing at milestones and an accounting practice on a monthly retainer both discover a payment problem in week three rather than in month four. At that point it’s still a conversation rather than a loss. One large invoice at the end of an engagement puts all the risk in a single document, and it leaves you nothing to test the client with beforehand.
Take a deposit where the work is bespoke. It’s the ordinary shape of the trade. A client who can’t pay a deposit has told you something useful at the only moment that information is free.
Write down what happens when payment is late, before it is. Sessions, fieldwork or a next phase that gets scheduled once the balance is settled is a term. The identical sentence improvised in month four is a penalty, and it’ll land as one.
Invoice the day the work is accepted. Every day you delay is a day added to their terms, and it comes off the same end of the calendar.
What Point holds, and what it does not
The deciding above is yours, and it stays yours. The part worth giving away is narrower, and it’s what quietly eats a Friday. Holding fourteen due dates in your head. Finding out on the 19th that something should have gone out on the 12th.
Point is a full email client, working on the Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailbox you already have. You keep the same address. Your mail stays where it is. A client reading your invoice sees the same thing they always did.
Start with the dates, because every message in this sequence falls weeks after the moment you thought about it. As you send the invoice, say in ordinary words that the next move is theirs and when you’ll come back. The wait becomes a dated task, sitting alongside the rest of your workload with one link back to the thread. On the day, it surfaces if the conversation is still unanswered, and stays quiet if the client has already replied. That’s what separates it from setting a thread aside until a date you guessed at. Everything you’ve handed off collects in one list rather than one thread at a time. So you can see that this is the third open item with the same client before you write, which is the view tracking what you are owed is built around.
Two other pieces earn their place here. A payment run is an event rather than an answer, and a standing request watches for it. It tells you once, on the day, and leaves the rest of your week to you. And where the matter turns out to have resolved somewhere you were looking away, on a call or in a remittance advice you skimmed past, the task gets flagged as apparently settled, with the evidence for that shown alongside it. It stays open until you agree. That check is what stops you chasing a client for something they dealt with on Thursday.
Then the drafting. A chase arrives already written in your manner, carrying the reference, the figure and the two dates. That’s the mechanical half of every message in this piece. Yours is the other half: whether this is the week to name the November work, and whether the stop is fair. How far Point goes on its own is a setting you make for each kind of action separately, from suggest-only through preparing something and holding it, to handling it outright. Everything begins at review. Anything carrying a figure is the last kind of work you’d move off that setting. Each thing done for you is entered as it happens, in sequence and in ordinary language, and that entry is what undo unwinds. Undo reaches as far as anything can reach, which stops at your client’s mail server. A delivered message sits somewhere neither of you controls.
The money itself sits outside all of this. Point issues nothing, collects nothing and keeps no ledger. The only reason anything in it knows invoice 3081 exists is that you sent the invoice from here and set a date. Your balances belong in an invoicing tool or in practice management software, which are built for exactly that and are good at it. Point’s half is the date, the thread, the draft and the account of what went out. Everything else it does with a mailbox is on the benefits page.
Common questions
How do I write a follow-up email for an unpaid invoice?
Reply in the invoice thread, so the number, the amount and the due date sit above what you write. State that the date has passed, once, as a plain fact. Then name the possibilities and let the reader pick one. It never reached payables. Something on it needs correcting. It’s waiting on an approval. Or it’s queued for the next payment run. Attach the invoice again, offer to reissue it in whatever form they need, and stop. The message is there to locate the problem rather than to apply pressure, and a reader who can answer in four words usually does.
How long after the due date should I follow up on an invoice?
The morning after. A date was agreed in writing and it has gone, so the interval is already settled for you. The message is a factual observation rather than an imposition. Then roughly weekly. Day eight adds one fact. Day fifteen goes to the payer directly. Day thirty asks the direct question. Somewhere between day forty-five and day sixty you decide to stop. Information is the exception. If the client tells you which payment run it’s in, the schedule stops and you wait for that date.
How many times should I follow up on an unpaid invoice?
Four or five messages after the due date is a complete sequence. What matters more than the count is whether each one carries something the last one left out. Four identical reminders are one message sent four times, and by the third the reader has learned that nothing follows. If you’ve sent four and the silence is total, the invoice has stopped being the problem. Either your mail is going astray, or you’re writing to somebody who can’t pay you. A phone call settles both of those, and it’s the move rather than a fifth email.
What if the client says the invoice is wrong or they never received it?
Treat it as the best outcome available. A stated objection is a fixable problem. Reissue the same day, corrected, with the purchase order number and the contract description on it, and it usually pays on the next run. Leave the question of whether the original was correct where it is, and take them at their word about receiving it. The cost of reissuing is ten minutes. The cost of establishing who was right is the relationship and the invoice.
Can I charge interest or a late fee on an overdue invoice?
Only if it was a term of your engagement before the work started. Even then, what you may charge is governed by your contract and by state law, which varies. A percentage that appears for the first time in the message applying it is a reaction rather than a term, and every client reads it as one. For most small practices the consequence that actually works carries no percentage. The next block of work is scheduled once the balance is settled. It’s easy to state calmly, and it’s the same for every client. The general position on late fees, and on the debt collection rules people wrongly assume bind them, is in the polite reminder email.
Who should I send it to when my usual contact stops replying?
Accounts payable, with your usual contact copied and left to simply read it. Payables can tell you within a minute whether the invoice exists in their system, whether anything on it is blocking payment, and which run it’s in. Those are three answers only they hold. Say in the thread that you’re going to write to payables, then do it. If you prepare tax returns, contacting anybody outside the engagement about a client’s affairs is a separate and stricter question, covered in chasing a client who will not reply.
When should I stop chasing and write the invoice off?
When you’ve asked the direct question and the answer stays missing, which is usually somewhere between day forty-five and day sixty. Stop in writing rather than quietly. Say what you’ve completed, what you’re releasing, and what happens next. A client who thinks you’re still working is the situation that turns a bad debt into a bigger problem. Before you count on the deduction, check your basis. A cash-basis practice never recognized the fee as income, so there’s nothing to deduct. The write-off is a decision to stop spending hours rather than a tax event.
Should I stop work over an unpaid invoice?
You can, if you said in advance that you would. Say it again before you do it, rather than afterward. A next phase that gets scheduled once the balance clears is a term somebody agreed to. A canceled week with an explanation attached is a punishment, and it’ll be experienced as one. Either way, billing more hours to a client who has stopped paying is exposure rather than progress, and it raises the cost of the exit you may end up taking.
The short version
Start from the assumption that the invoice is stuck. Most of the time it is, and the reason is administrative. A missing purchase order number. A vendor record that was never set up. An approval nobody chased. A payment run that closes on a day you’d never been told about. So the first message after the due date is a diagnostic one. State that the date has gone, name the four things it usually is, and let the reader pick.
Check your own invoice first, because a document missing a required field gets rejected silently. Then run the schedule your terms already wrote. The morning after. Day eight with one added fact. Day fifteen to the payer directly. Day thirty with the direct question. A decision around day forty-five. Write to the person who can actually pay you, tell your usual contact before you do, and stop the sequence the moment somebody gives you a date.
Two facts belong in your head before you decide anything. A client 45 days past terms has asked you to fund them for longer than the median small business could last with no income at all, so this is worth more attention than it feels like. And if your practice is on the cash basis, writing it off produces no deduction, because the fee was never income. What survives, either way, is the record. The dated list of what you sent and when is what “reasonable steps to collect” means in practice, and it’s the only account of events that lasts.
What sits behind the invoice differs by trade. An accounting practice is usually billing an owner who also signs the checks, so the delay is a decision, and that sequence should reach the direct question fast. A consultancy is usually billing a company, where the delay is a process. There the useful question is which stage of that process the invoice has reached. Eight trades hit this week from their own angle, and they’re laid out at who this was built for.