Getting Paid: Invoices, Collections and Subscriptions

You sold. You delivered. You issued the invoice.

And you have not been paid.

Between that sentence and the one before it stands what kills small businesses most — not too few sales,

but sales that never turned into cash.

The sentence this book rests on

A sale is not complete at signature — it is complete at collection.

Until you are paid, you did not sell: you lent.

And the difference is not verbal. Whoever sells on terms gives their customer financing — goods or a

service now, money later. And you never decided to be a bank, yet you became one the day you accepted

terms with no conditions.

The number your books hide

Open your profit statement: it looks good. And the profit in it is built on invoices you issued, not

on money that arrived.

So you can be profitable on paper and broke in the till, and this happens often.

And ask yourself three things now:

• How much do your customers owe you today?
• How much of it is more than two months old?
• And how much of it do you privately know will never be collected?

And the third is the one people avoid — because admitting it **turns a number in the assets column into a

loss** (chapter ten).

Why you are not paid — in order

And this is the most important ordering in the book, because it decides what you do:

1. Ambiguity. ← and it is the largest by a wide margin. The invoice reached the wrong person, or it

lacks a number their system requires, or the term was never written so each side reads it differently

(chapter five).

2. Their process. ← an approval cycle and payments on a set day. Not stalling, and you never asked

about it.

3. Priority. ← they have cash, and they pay whoever chases first. **And whoever does not follow up is

paid last.**

4. A dispute. ← they are unhappy about something and did not tell you.

5. Inability. ← they genuinely do not have the money.

6. Bad faith. ← the rarest, and always assumed first.

And the wrong assumption costs you twice: you treat a well-meaning customer as a staller **and lose a

relationship, and you leave an administrative cause to recur with every other customer. And most of what

looks like stalling is the first item.**

When collection is not your problem

And I will say when this book does not concern you:

1. You sell for cash only. No terms and no subscriptions ← you do not have collections, you have

sales.

2. Your customers are few, you know them, and they pay on time ← **do not build a procedure for a problem

you do not have**.

3. Your problem is that what you sell is not being bought. ← and this is the most honest. If your

sales are few to begin with, collection is not your door — the problem is the offer, the price or the

market, and no follow-up ladder will solve it.

4. You are late delivering. ← before you chase, deliver. Whoever chases money for late work **starts

the conversation losing**, and will hear about it on the first call.

And the fourth is the one people resist, and it is the one to check first.

What this book is — and is not

It is about the money arriving: terms, the deposit, follow-up, the conversation, when to stop work,

subscriptions, and bad debt.

It is not about the invoice as a document nor about the invoicing gateway — that is "National

E-Invoicing".

Nor about your books — that is "From Excel to an Accounting System", **and receivables detailed by their

open invoices are a precondition for everything here**, explained there.

Nor about writing replies to your customers — that is "Replying to Your Customers", **whose rule that

money is never automated** applies here literally (chapter seven).

Nor about a project's scope and milestones — that is the "Requesting Custom Software" course.

And I will not mention a single figure from my own prices or terms. Numbers belong to each business

alone, and the method belongs to nobody.

And when it reaches a legal claim, a contract, or waiving a debt — consult your lawyer, and I issue no

ruling on any of it.

Start with this today

Thirty minutes, and the hardest thing you will do in this book:

Print your receivables sorted by age: every invoice, when it fell due, and how many days have passed.

Then put one of the six causes beside each. **And if your answer is "I don't know" for most of them, that

is your first discovery.**

Action steps

1. Write the sentence: a sale is complete at collection.
2. Print your receivables sorted by age today.
3. Put one of the six causes beside every overdue invoice.
4. Do not assume bad faith — start from ambiguity.
5. Answer the three questions, the third being the most honest.
6. Go through "when this book does not concern you" — starting with the fourth.
7. Check your own delivery before you chase.
8. Do not build a procedure before chapter two — the decision comes before the follow-up.