About this site
Fifty notes on invoicing and getting paid, written from one side of the table: the smaller supplier dealing with a larger buyer. Freelancers, one-person businesses, small agencies and trades — anybody who does the work first, invoices afterwards, and then waits inside somebody else's process.
What it covers
What can be settled before any work begins: whether to take the customer at all, at what price, on what terms, and with what paid up front. What the order decides, and why an invoice with no purchase order behind it cannot be paid by anybody, however willing. What to agree and record while the work is still in your hands. What makes an invoice payable on arrival, and where it has to go. What happens to it between arrival and payment — matching, approval, the payment run — and which of those days anybody owns. How to ask for money without a credit department. And what is actually available when it does not come: a formal demand, recovery, the small claims route, invoice finance, and the decision to stop.
The argument running through it
Almost all of a small supplier's leverage exists before the work starts, and almost none of it after the invoice is sent. The collection is ordered by how much you can still do, which is why it begins with deciding whether to agree and ends with writing a debt off.
What it is not
It is not legal, accounting or credit advice, and it does not tell any business what its terms should be. What may be charged, what interest may be claimed, what a demand must contain, how insolvency ranks creditors and what court routes exist all differ by jurisdiction, by contract and by the parties concerned, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified in the place concerned.
It is also not a guide to invoicing software, a product comparison or a set of templates to download.
About the figures
Every number used anywhere on this site is an illustration of what one supplier recorded for itself, labelled as such on the page where it appears. None of it is a benchmark, an industry average or a statement about any named organisation, and none of it should be read as a description of how any particular buyer behaves.
About this domain
Day Nought is an independent reference project about the practical sequence, records and decisions involved in invoicing and getting paid.