You have already paid the worker. An unpaid invoice is cash out of the door, not lost margin — which is why the timetable matters more in recruitment than almost anywhere else.
Recruitment has a cash flow shape that makes unpaid invoices particularly painful: on temporary and contract placements you have already paid the worker before the client pays you, so an unpaid invoice is not lost margin, it is money you have physically sent out of the door.
The recurring pattern is a client who accepts the candidate, lets the rebate period expire, and then raises a complaint about the placement when the invoice is chased. Whether that is a genuine dispute or a tactical one usually turns on documents you already have: the terms of business and how they were accepted, the candidate introduction and its acknowledgement, and the start confirmation.
The single most common weakness is terms of business that were emailed but never clearly accepted, on an engagement that then proceeded anyway. That is an argument worth having on paper before it becomes an argument in a claim.
Timesheets are the evidence. An authorised timesheet, signed or approved through a portal, converts 'we dispute the hours' into a documented acceptance. Where approval is by portal, being able to export the audit trail matters more than people expect at the point of a dispute.
Watch for pay-when-paid arrangements in the client's terms. In construction these are largely ineffective by statute; in general commercial contracts they can bite, and they are worth removing at the negotiation stage rather than discovering at the chase stage.
Recruitment ledgers are the ones where statutory compensation adds up fastest, because the invoicing is high-volume: weekly temp invoices mean many separate late payments, and the fixed sum attaches to each. A client with thirty late weekly invoices owes thirty fixed sums, not one.
If the rebate period has expired and the placement was accepted, that is a commercial complaint rather than a defence to the fee — but it depends on your terms. Send us the terms of business, the introduction and the start confirmation and we will tell you which of the two you have.
Often yes. Terms can be incorporated by course of dealing or by conduct, and a client who received the terms, took the candidate and started them has a difficult argument. It is weaker than a signature and it is worth fixing for the future, but it is a long way from hopeless.
Yes, and it is usually the better economics — the compensation sums alone are material at volume. Send the aged debtors report and we will triage it before quoting, so the fee attaches only to the debts where it changes the outcome.
Then most routes close. Check for a guarantee, submit a proof of debt, and speak to your accountant about VAT bad debt relief. See when a customer is insolvent.
The letter-before-action checklist, the interest and compensation rules, and the escalation ladder with what each step costs. One email, no sequence.
Tell us what you are owed and who owes it. You get back what the debt is actually worth once interest and compensation are added, what we would do first, and the fixed fee for doing it.