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.

How to Change a Client’s Payment Terms

The short answer

Terms are easy to set and hard to change, so most agencies carry the terms they agreed on their first project with a client for years afterwards. The fix is timing rather than persuasion.

Attach the change to a moment that already exists, rather than raising it on its own.
Ask for 1 thing, not 3.
Price the terms, so the client can see what they are choosing.
Where terms are imposed and immovable, change the shape of the billing instead.
Get the new version into the contract, rather than agreeing it by email.

Raised cold, a request to shorten terms reads as a complaint about the client. Raised at renewal, it reads as housekeeping. The words barely matter; the moment does.

Why nobody fixes them

Payment terms are set once, usually early, often by whoever sent the first proposal, and frequently by copying the last one. Nothing in the normal running of an account forces a review, so they persist long after the relationship, the amounts and the work have all changed.

Then 2 things make them harder to revisit. The client has no reason to want shorter terms, since the current arrangement is free credit. And raising it implies dissatisfaction, which makes it feel like a confrontation rather than an administrative question.

So the terms outlive their logic. An agency billing a client $4,000 a month on net 45 in 2024 is often still on net 45 at $18,000 a month in 2026, carrying 3 times the exposure on terms nobody has looked at.

The 4 moments when it is easy

Each of these contains a natural reason to revisit the paperwork, which is what you are borrowing:

Moment	What to say	Why it works
Contract renewal	Here is the new agreement, with updated terms	The document is already being replaced
A price review	The rate changes from January, and so do the terms	1 conversation covers both
A new statement of work	This project runs on our standard terms	New work, new paper, no precedent broken
A change in scope or team	The commitment is larger, so the terms match it	The client can see what changed

If none of those is close, create one. A scheduled annual review of the arrangement is worth putting into contracts precisely so that this conversation has somewhere to live, which is the argument in the retainer piece.

Ask for 1 thing

The common mistake is asking for shorter terms, a deposit and a late fee at once, which reads as a renegotiation and invites a counter-proposal. Pick the change that helps most and leave the others.

A deposit is usually the easiest to get, and this surprises people. Payment terms are often set centrally by procurement and genuinely cannot be varied by your contact, while an upfront payment can frequently be approved by whoever holds the project budget. How to ask covers the wording.
Staged billing changes when you invoice rather than when they pay, which means it needs no change to their terms at all. For long projects this moves more cash than shortening terms would, as milestone billing sets out.
Shorter terms are the hardest, because they are the thing procurement exists to protect. Ask when the amount is growing.
A late fee rarely changes behaviour on its own and is best agreed as part of a wider document rather than requested alone, for the reasons in the piece on whether late fees work.

The order is deliberate. The first 2 are within your own control or your contact's, and the last 2 need someone neither of you has met.

Put a price on the terms

Terms are a commercial variable, and treating them as one changes the conversation from a favour to a trade. 60 extra days of credit on $200,000 of annual billing is roughly $33,000 of your money financing their operations at any moment. That is a number, and numbers are negotiable in a way that requests are not.

Which gives you 2 honest offers to make. Either the terms shorten and the rate stays, or the terms stay and the rate reflects the cost of carrying them. Most clients choose the first, because their procurement target is price rather than payment timing.

Subject: Our agreement from [date] — small change
Hi [Name],
As we're putting the new agreement together, I'd like to move payment terms from net 60 to net 30 for the coming year.
The practical reason: at the current volume we're carrying around [amount] of work in progress at any point, and the shorter cycle lets us keep the team committed to you rather than balancing it against other work.
If net 30 isn't possible on your side, a [20]% deposit at the start of each quarter would have the same effect for us, and I'd be happy with either.
Nothing else changes.
Thanks,
[Name]

The final 2 lines do the work. Offering an alternative lets a contact who genuinely cannot move the terms give you something they can, and stating that nothing else changes stops the client treating the email as an opening bid in a larger negotiation.

When the client sets the terms

With larger clients, terms often arrive as policy rather than as a proposal. Procurement specifies net 60 or net 90, the supplier portal encodes it, and your contact genuinely cannot change it.

Accept that quickly rather than spending the relationship on it, then do the things that are still open to you: invoice the day a stage completes rather than at month end, make sure the first invoice clears their process cleanly, and watch the real payment dates rather than the stated ones, which is what the weekly numbers are for.

And price it in. A client on net 90 costs more to serve than one on net 14, and the rate should say so quietly rather than the relationship absorbing it.

What the law gives you

Not much in the US, where business-to-business payment terms are largely a matter of freedom of contract and the limits that exist tend to be industry-specific or public-sector. The federal government sets its own standard rather than the market's, paying on the 30th day after a proper invoice.

In the EU there is a real lever. The European Commission's guidance is that businesses pay within 60 days unless they expressly agree otherwise and the arrangement is not grossly unfair. Article 7 of the Late Payment Directive then defines that test, requiring all circumstances to be considered including any gross deviation from good commercial practice, contrary to good faith and fair dealing. It goes further on 2 specific points: a term excluding interest for late payment is to be considered grossly unfair, and a term excluding compensation for recovery costs is presumed to be grossly unfair.

So an EU client imposing 90 days with interest excluded is on weaker ground than they may realise. That is rarely worth raising as a threat, and occasionally worth knowing when somebody tells you their terms are not negotiable.

In the UK, public contracts carry an implied 30-day term, and large companies publish their actual payment performance twice a year, which makes a slow payer's record a matter of public record rather than your opinion.

When to accept terms you do not like

Sometimes the right answer is yes. A client who pays reliably on net 60 is easier to run than one who pays erratically on net 30, and predictability is worth more than speed for planning purposes.

Accept deliberately when the client is large and reliable, when the work is strategically valuable, or when the amount is small enough that the timing does not matter. Then manage the consequence rather than resenting it: stage the billing, price it in, and keep the exposure within a limit you set in advance, which is the situation described in when your biggest client is your latest payer.

FAQ

How do I change a client's payment terms?

Attach it to a moment that already exists, such as a renewal, a price review or a new statement of work, and ask for 1 change rather than several. Raised on its own, the same request reads as a complaint about the client.

What if procurement says the terms cannot change?

Often true, and worth accepting quickly. Ask instead for a deposit or staged billing, which a project budget holder can frequently approve even when payment terms are set centrally and genuinely immovable.

Should I charge more for longer payment terms?

Yes, quietly, in the rate. 60 extra days of credit on significant annual billing is a large amount of your money financing their operations, and pricing it is more honest than absorbing it and resenting it.

Can a client impose any payment terms they like?

In the US, broadly yes between businesses. In the EU, terms beyond 60 days must be expressly agreed and not grossly unfair, and a term excluding late payment interest is treated as grossly unfair outright. Take advice before relying on that.

When is the best time to raise it?

At renewal, at a price change, or when the volume of work increases. The change is easiest to make when something else is already changing, because the paperwork is being touched anyway.

Is it worth switching a good client to shorter terms?

Only if the timing actually causes you a problem. A reliable payer on net 60 may be easier to plan around than an erratic one on net 30, so fix the exposure and the billing shape first and leave the terms alone.

Not legal advice. Rules on payment terms and unfair contract terms differ by country and by sector, and the provisions mentioned here have their own scope and exceptions. Take advice before relying on any of them.

‹ The Client Says They Paid. You Cannot See It.

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