Can you help me start taking deposits before projects begin?

Yes. If you currently work mostly on post-payment terms, I can help you introduce deposits without making the client experience awkward. We can work out where a deposit makes sense, how much to ask for, when it should be due, and how to communicate the change to existing and new clients. I can also handle the payment follow-up once the process is in place. The goal isn’t just to chase invoices faster. It’s to build better payment habits into the way your agency works.

We finished the work, but the client has been ignoring me for weeks. Can you help?

Yes. This is one of the situations the service is designed for. I can take over the overdue payment follow-up, establish what is actually blocking payment, keep the conversation moving, and escalate it when needed. Sometimes the invoice is genuinely stuck in procurement or finance. Sometimes nobody internally has taken ownership. And sometimes the client is simply avoiding the conversation. Those situations need different approaches. You stay informed, but you don’t have to spend another three weeks writing increasingly uncomfortable “just following up” emails.

Why hire payment operations support instead of an accountant or bookkeeper?

Because accounting and payment follow-through are different jobs. Your accountant can tell you that an invoice is overdue. They usually aren’t responsible for managing the client relationship around it, navigating procurement, chasing approvals, figuring out who is blocking payment, or deciding when and how to escalate. Payment operations sits between finance, client communication, and account management. I work on the client side of the problem: getting the payment process unstuck and keeping it moving until the money arrives.

Why not just hire a VA to chase invoices?

You can, if the job is purely administrative. But payment follow-up often stops being administrative very quickly. Clients can usually tell from the language, framing, and questions whether they are speaking to someone who has authority and understands commercial relationships. And when they sense that the person following up has no real decision-making power, the message becomes easier to postpone. That is the uncomfortable part. You don’t necessarily need another full-time operations executive. But you do need someone who can communicate like one. With this service, you get senior-level client and payment communication backed by 15 years of operational experience, at a cost closer to outsourced admin support. That works because the process is narrow, structured, and heavily streamlined.

Will my clients know I outsourced payment follow-up?

They will know they are speaking to someone responsible for payment operations on your side. That is the point. I’m not pretending to be you, and I’m not sending generic collections emails. The communication should feel like a natural extension of your agency: professional, informed, calm, and appropriately firm. You stay the person responsible for the client relationship. I become the person responsible for keeping the payment process moving.

Will this damage my client relationships?

It shouldn’t. In many cases, it does the opposite. One reason founders struggle with overdue payments is that they are trying to protect the relationship while also asking for money. Those two roles can become emotionally tangled. Separating them helps. You can continue discussing the work and the relationship with the client, while I handle the payment process. The communication stays professional and proportionate, with escalation only when it is actually necessary.

Do you work with late invoices only?

No. I can help with the whole client-side payment process: deposits, payment schedules, invoice follow-ups, procurement delays, overdue payments, internal blockers, and escalation. The best time to fix payment operations is actually before an invoice becomes 45 days overdue.

What happens if a client simply refuses to pay?

I can manage the commercial follow-up and escalation process, but this isn’t a debt collection or legal service. If the issue reaches the point where legal action, formal debt recovery, or a solicitor is required, I’ll make that clear and help you organize the communication and documentation for the next step. The aim is to resolve the issue before it gets there whenever possible.

Who is this service for?

Small agencies and studios where the founder or another senior person is still personally managing deposits, invoice reminders, procurement questions, and overdue payments. It is particularly useful if you have good revenue but uneven payment timing, a small number of high-value clients, or clients with complicated procurement processes. The service is intentionally narrow: I take payment chasing off the founder’s plate without adding another full-time operations hire.

The accounts@ Inbox: Why Invoices Should Come From a Shared Billing Address

The short answer

Send every invoice, statement and payment follow-up from a shared billing address on your own domain, such as accounts@youragency.com, and send it to your client’s accounts payable inbox rather than your project contact. Accounts payable gets a stable address for your supplier record, money conversations move out of the client relationship thread, and somebody other than the founder can own the payment work without anything changing on the client’s side.

The setup, in order:

Create the address as a shared mailbox or group.
Point your invoicing software’s sender and reply-to at it.
Authenticate your domain so invoices are not filtered as spam.
Update the contact email on each client’s supplier record.
Decide who reads it, and when.

The last step is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that decides whether the rest works.

What goes wrong when invoices come from you

An invoice sent from the founder’s address to a project contact takes the longest route available. The contact receives it alongside feedback on the latest round of work, forwards it to finance when they remember, and the forward arrives without the purchase order number or the approval it needs. That is how an uncontested invoice ends up parked, which is the first of the 7 reasons clients pay late.

Replies go astray too. When accounts payable has a question, it goes back to whoever sent the invoice. If that is the founder, the question lands between a pitch and a client call and waits for a quiet hour that does not come.

The two conversations also get tangled. Asking a client for a payment date from the same address, in the same thread where you discussed their launch yesterday, puts the relationship and the money in one message. A separate address is the cheapest way to separate the roles, and it is what makes it possible for someone other than you to own follow-up.

What accounts payable does with your address

Clients with a finance function set you up as a supplier before they can pay you. The supplier record holds your legal name, bank details, tax information and a contact email, and accounts payable uses that email for remittance advice and invoice queries. Most AP teams also have their own address that invoices must be sent to, and it is rarely your project contact’s.

A shared address keeps that record correct when people change at your end. With the founder’s personal address on it, every remittance advice and every query goes to one person’s inbox for as long as the record exists.

Ask for the client’s AP address at signature, in the same email where you confirm the purchase order. It is one line in the kickoff email and saves a month of forwarding later.

How to set it up

1. Create the address

In Google Workspace, a Google Group with the collaborative inbox feature lets several people read and reply from one address. In Microsoft 365, a shared mailbox does the same job and does not need its own paid licence for ordinary use. A plain alias forwarding to your own inbox works for a one-person agency, but it loses the separation that makes the address worth having, so treat it as temporary.

2. Point your invoicing software at it

Invoicing and accounting tools let you set the sender name and the reply-to address on invoice emails. Set both to the billing address, so a client replying to an invoice reaches accounts@ rather than a no-reply mailbox or the founder.

3. Authenticate your domain

If your invoicing software sends email on your behalf, add the SPF and DKIM records it gives you to your domain. Without them, an invoice sent “from” your domain by someone else’s mail server is more likely to be filtered by the client’s mail system, and nobody tells you it happened. The tool’s help pages list the exact records.

4. Update every client’s supplier record

Email each active client’s AP team once, from the new address, with your supplier details and a request to update the contact email. Keep it to 4 lines. From then on, send invoices to their AP inbox and copy your project contact if they want visibility.

5. Decide who reads it

An unread billing address is worse than the founder’s inbox, because at least the founder sees their own email. Name one person, give them a fixed time each day to check it, and keep the follow-up schedule alongside it. If that person works outside the company, give them access to the shared mailbox rather than setting up a forward.

accounts@, billing@ or invoices@?

Using one address consistently matters more than which word you pick. accounts@ tends to be the convention in the UK and Australia, and billing@ or ar@ are more familiar to US finance teams. invoices@ reads as receive-only, which suits a client’s AP team and sits oddly on yours, because you want replies.

Avoid finance@ if you might one day separate paying your own suppliers from billing your clients. You will end up needing two addresses, and changing the one on every client record twice is the job you were trying to avoid.

What it costs

Very little in money. A shared mailbox or collaborative inbox is included in most business email plans. The real cost is the one-off email to every client and the discipline of reading the address every day.

The risk worth naming is the changeover month, when some clients still reply to the founder and some reply to accounts@. Check both for a few weeks rather than assuming the switch has taken. The payment operations wiki has the full accounts@ setup alongside the escalation ladder and templates, and the follow-up email templates work unchanged from the new address.

FAQ

What email address should invoices be sent from?

A shared billing address on your own domain, such as accounts@ or billing@, rather than a personal inbox or a no-reply address. It stays on your client’s supplier record when people change at your end, and replies about the invoice reach whoever owns payment.

Who should I send an invoice to?

Your client’s accounts payable inbox. Most clients with a finance team have one and will give it to you on request. Copy your project contact if they need to see the invoice, but send it to the people who process it.

Is a shared mailbox free?

In Microsoft 365, a shared mailbox does not need its own paid licence for ordinary use. In Google Workspace, a Google Group set up as a collaborative inbox is included in the plan. Check your provider’s current limits before relying on either.

Why do invoices end up in the client’s spam folder?

Usually because invoicing software sends them from your domain without SPF and DKIM set up for that software, so the client’s mail system cannot confirm the sender. Adding the records your invoicing tool provides fixes most cases.

Can someone outside my company use our accounts@ address?

Yes, and that is one of the main reasons to set it up. A bookkeeper or a fractional payment operations owner can be given access to the shared mailbox and work the payment thread from your domain, so nothing changes from the client’s side.

‹ What It Costs to Chase Your Own Invoices

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