Long-form answers to the questions businesses actually ask about getting paid. Free, and useful whether or not you ever instruct us.
What you can add to a late invoice, at what rate, and how to claim it without souring the relationship.
Read it →What has to be in it, the two different regimes, and the mistakes that cost you on costs later.
Read it →What issuing actually involves, what it costs, and the three questions to answer before you do it.
Read it →The clauses that change behaviour, the ones that do nothing, and why terms on the back of an invoice are usually too late.
Read it →What the public record tells you before you extend credit — and what it tells you before you spend money chasing.
Read it →When to stop, how to make the write-off count for tax and VAT, and what to keep in case the debtor reappears.
Read it →Almost everything a business needs to know about getting an invoice paid is public. The Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act, the pre-action protocols, the court fee scales and the enforcement routes are all published, and none of it is secret knowledge that has to be bought. What is genuinely hard is knowing which bits apply to your situation, in what order, and what each step is likely to cost against what it is likely to return.
These guides are that. They are written for a business owner with an unpaid invoice and no particular interest in becoming an expert, and they are deliberately specific — the actual rate, the actual thresholds, the actual fees, with the source and the date we last checked it. Every figure on this site is listed at where our figures come from, because a wrong rate on a debt recovery site is not a typo, it is a bad calculation somebody may act on.
If a guide and the interest calculator between them get your invoice paid, that is a good outcome and it costs you nothing. Plenty of commercial debts are recovered by a business owner who simply worked out what they were actually owed and said so, in writing, with a date on it.
Where people come to us is the point at which the next step costs real money and they want to know whether it is worth taking — or where the debtor is an individual rather than a company and the rules change, or where a dispute has been raised and escalating would make things worse. Those are judgement calls rather than research, and that is what the fee is for.
If you have one invoice that is late and the customer is a company that can clearly afford to pay, read the late payment interest guide first, work out what the debt is really worth, and then read the letter before action guide. Those two between them are the whole of what most people need.
If you are looking at an aged ledger rather than a single invoice, start with checking whether a customer can actually pay — triage is worth more than effort at that stage, and the compensation sums across a long ledger are usually larger than anyone expects. And if the problem keeps recurring, the payment terms guide is the one that stops it happening again, which is cheaper than recovering it.
The letter-before-action checklist, the interest and compensation rules, and what each escalation step costs.
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.