Chase the Money Without the Awkward Part
Construction DSO is 83 days. Only 5% of subcontractors get paid on time. Fill in one invoice and get the whole escalation ladder — friendly nudge, firm notice, final notice, and a printable formal demand letter that Levelset charges $59 a pop to send.
The invoice you're chasing
Everything fills into the messages live. Leave a field blank and it stays a [placeholder] you can fill after copying.
Nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere. Every number and every message is built on your device.
Tone
Same facts, different register. The stage below sets how far along you are; this sets how you sound.
Friendly assumes they forgot, which is true most of the time. Firm assumes they saw it and deprioritised you. Final assumes you're done being patient and writing for a record. Don't skip to Final on day three — you burn a customer over an oversight and you look like you can't run a book.
STAGE 1 · DAY 1–7 The nudge YOU ARE HERE
Most late invoices are forgetfulness, not refusal. Send this the day after the due date. Early and warm reads as organised. Late and warm reads as a pushover.
STAGE 2 · DAY 8–21 Firm, with a date YOU ARE HERE
Now be specific. How late it is, exactly when you need the money, and what the terms say about the fee. Offering to waive the fee if they pay by a date works more often than the fee itself does.
STAGE 3 · DAY 22–45 Final notice YOU ARE HERE
One professional message. Work is paused, a payment plan is genuinely on the table, and you name the next step. State facts. Never threaten anything you wouldn't actually do.
STAGE 4 · DAY 46+ Formal demand letter YOU ARE HERE
The document itself. Print it, sign it, and send it certified mail with return receipt so you can prove it arrived. This is the thing Levelset sells at $59 per recipient. Below is the same letter, free, and it prints as a document, not as a web page.
Printing hides the whole page and outputs only the letter, on a one-inch margin. Sign it in ink, keep a copy, and mail it certified with return receipt requested — the receipt is the part that matters if this ever reaches a courtroom.
Your AR aging, in ten seconds
Paste your open invoices and see the whole picture: what's current, what's 30, 60, 90 days out, and who is actually costing you. One line per invoice, in this order: customer, invoice number, amount, due date. Commas or tabs both work, so a copy-paste straight out of a spreadsheet is fine.
| Customer | Invoice | Amount | Due | Days late | Bucket |
|---|
Estimates for planning, not tax or legal advice.
How do you ask for a late payment without wrecking the relationship? Send a short, warm reminder the day after the due date, because most late invoices are an oversight. If nothing happens by day 8, get specific: name the days late, give a pay-by date, and reference the late fee your terms allow. At day 22 to 45, send one professional final notice that pauses future work and offers a payment plan. Past day 45, send a formal demand letter by certified mail with a response deadline and a named next step. Escalate on a clock, not on a mood — that's what makes it read as process instead of anger.
Stop the problem upstream
How do you collect an overdue invoice?
- Fill in the invoice. Customer, invoice number, amount, and due date. Days past due and the late fee compute themselves against today.
- Read the recommendation. The tool tells you which of the four stages you should be on today, based on how late the invoice actually is, and highlights that panel.
- Pick a tone. Friendly assumes they forgot. Firm assumes they deprioritised you. Final assumes you are writing for a record.
- Copy and send. Text or email at every stage. One message per stage. Do not carpet-bomb, and do not skip stages.
- Escalate on the clock. Day 1 to 7 a nudge, day 8 to 21 firm with a pay-by date, day 22 to 45 a final notice, day 46 and beyond the formal demand letter by certified mail.
- Log every send. Note the date you sent each one. That trail is your evidence if this ever reaches small claims, and it is what makes the escalation read as process rather than temper.
How bad is the late payment problem, really?
Bad enough that it's the normal condition of the industry, not an exception you got unlucky with.
- Construction runs 83 days DSO against about 60 days across all industries.
- 82% of contractors wait more than 30 days to get paid. Two years earlier that figure was 49%.
- Only 5% of subcontractors get paid on time.
- Slow payment cost the US construction industry an estimated $280 billion in 2024.
- Contractors inflate bids by an average of 8% to hedge the delay. Everyone pays for this, including the customers who do pay on time.
- One in three subcontractors pulls from personal or retirement savings to bridge the gap.
- Across all US small business, 43% of B2B invoice value is overdue and about 5% gets written off as bad debt.
- The average US small business is carrying $17,000 or more in overdue invoices. Freelancers average around $6,000.
- Freelancers spend 8.5 hours a month chasing money. That is a full workday, every month, unbilled.
Sources: CreditPulse 2025 (DSO), Rabbet 2024 (30-day waits, $280B), CCFG Credit 2024 (5% of subs), Built 2025 (8% bid inflation), Billd 2025 (personal savings), Atradius 2025 US B2B Payment Trends (43% overdue, 5% written off), QuickBooks 2025 ($17,000), Freelancers Union, Jobbers.io 2025 (8.5 hours), all aggregated by DocJoist's 2026 construction payment report and Clockify's late-invoice statistics compilation.
Why do you actually get paid late?
Here's the part that most invoicing software will never tell you, because it sells the wrong fix. CompanyCam looked at where payment actually stalls and found three chokepoints, and all three happen before the invoice goes out:
- Unclear scope. The payer starts questioning line items, and the whole request freezes while the argument happens.
- Undocumented change orders. Work added verbally or over text, with no proof when the payer decides they never agreed to it.
- Disputed completion. No evidence the work is finished, so sign-off and retainage release stall out.
Their conclusion is the single most useful sentence in this whole category:
"Faster invoicing software cannot resolve a scope disagreement."
CompanyCam, on why contractors get paid late.The bottleneck is approval, not billing speed. The same research puts subs at an average 56-day wait against the 30-day cycle general contractors think they're running — a 26-day approval gap that nobody's software is closing. Which is why the highest-value free tools in this category are documents, not payment rails. A change order signed on the tailgate beats an invoicing app with a faster send button, every time.
What do the paid collection tools cost?
| Product | 2026 price | What you get | Honest note |
|---|---|---|---|
| This page | $0, no account | Four escalation stages, SMS and email at each, tone control, late fee math, printable demand letter, AR aging | You send everything yourself. Nothing is automated, nothing is mailed for you. |
| Levelset | $59 per recipient to send one demand letter. Same $59 to send a notice. | They draft it, mail it, and give you proof of service. Filing an actual lien needs a subscription. | The $59 is not really buying the letter — free templates exist, including this one. It's buying the affidavit of service. That is a real product and worth it if you're heading to court. |
| Chaser | From about £199/month (roughly $250+), rising to £599 and £899 on higher revenue tiers. | Automated chasing sequences wired into your accounting system, payment portal, forecasting. | Built for finance teams at companies doing millions. Entry price is more than most three-person shops spend on software in total. Genuinely irrelevant to a plumbing company, and we'd rather say that than pretend we compete. |
| Invoice2go (BILL) | $5.99 / $9.99 / $39.99 per month, no free version | Invoicing, payments, expense tracking | The Starter plan caps you at 30 invoices a year. That's 2.5 a month. Any working contractor is pushed up a tier immediately. The billing policy is also silent on what happens to your invoice records after you cancel. |
Sources: levelset.com demand letter page ($59 per recipient); chaserhq.com detailed pricing breakdown; invoice.2go.com pricing and billing policy pages; Capterra Invoice2go pricing. Retrieved August 2026.
How much late fee can you actually charge?
1.5% per month, which is 18% a year, is the standard defensible figure for business-to-business work in most US states. It is what the calculator above defaults to. Three things determine whether you can actually collect it:
- It had to be in the terms first. A fee the customer never agreed to before the work is hard to enforce and guaranteed to make the conversation worse. If it isn't in your contract or on the invoice, you don't have it. Say it's your policy going forward and put it on everything from now on.
- Your state caps it. State usury and finance-charge statutes limit what you can charge on an overdue account, and the ceilings vary a lot between states and between consumer and commercial work. Consumer jobs are generally held to a tighter standard than B2B. Above 1.5% a month, look it up before you bill it.
- Prorating is how it's normally computed. Monthly rate divided by 30, times days late, times the unpaid balance. On a $4,800 balance at 1.5% a month, that's $72 a month, or $2.40 a day. Thirty-four days late is $81.60. The calculator above shows you the daily number so you can quote it accurately in a message.
Worth being honest about what a late fee is for. It rarely gets paid, and it rarely covers the cost of the money. What it does is move you up the pile. A customer with eleven bills on the counter pays the ones that get more expensive if they wait. That's the whole mechanism.
What should you write, and what should you never write?
Every message you send is a document that could be read out loud in a small-claims hearing. Write like that's going to happen, because occasionally it does.
Do: keep it short. Name the invoice number, the amount, the due date, and the days late. Give a specific date you need the money by, not "as soon as possible." Offer a way out — a phone call, a payment plan, a way to raise a dispute. Send it in writing and keep a copy. Send one message per stage, not one a day.
Never: threaten anything beyond the civil steps you'd actually take. No ALL CAPS, no insults, no showing up at their house. Don't threaten a bad review in exchange for payment, which is its own legal problem. Don't send a fake "final legal warning" dressed up to look like it came from a law firm; that can be its own violation. Don't message daily, because harassment claims in debt collection are a real thing and you don't want to be on the wrong side of that conversation. And don't go silent for two months and then explode — the escalation only reads as serious if it looks like a process.
Calm reads as serious. Angry reads as bluffing. That's not a nicety, it's tactics.
What do contractors who get paid actually do differently?
From the Mike Holt electricians' forum, which is practitioners talking to each other rather than anybody selling anything:
"Get paid before you leave the job site!"
"Once you leave without payment, your chances of getting paid go down to next to nothing."
"It always seems that the people with money were the worst payers." — and the reply: "That's why they have money."
Mike Holt Enterprises forum, contractor discussion on customer payment.That first line is the entire strategy for residential service work, and it's free. The invoice you hand over in the driveway gets paid at a rate the invoice you email that evening never will. Take the card in the truck. Take the check before you load the ladder.
The same thread has the other half of it, for anything bigger: lien rights are a clock, not a threat. In many states you have to file a preliminary notice or a notice of intent to lien well before you can file the actual lien, and the windows are short and unforgiving. One contributor put it as "it's the 90 day clock that really counts as far as preserving your rights under lien law." Over 90,000 liens were recorded in the twelve months ending 2024, so this is not exotic. If you do commercial or new-construction work, find out your state's notice deadline before you need it, not after.
How do you stop this happening again?
Reminders fix this invoice. Paperwork fixes every invoice after it. Five things, roughly in order of how much they're worth:
- Take a deposit. A customer with their own money in the job pays the balance. For bigger work, bill in progress draws so you're never carrying more than one stage of labour and materials. Note that some states cap residential deposits — California limits them to $1,000 or 10% of the contract price, whichever is less.
- Bill due on receipt, not net 30. Net 30 is a courtesy invented for companies with an accounts-payable department. For service work, the invoice is due when the work is done. If a commercial customer insists on net 30, price it in.
- Write change orders down and get them signed. This is chokepoint number two and the single cheapest fix on the list. Verbal scope added on a Tuesday is worth nothing in October. Two lines and a signature on your phone is worth the whole change.
- Photograph completion. Before, after, and the finished work with something in frame for scale. Disputed completion is chokepoint three, and photos end that argument in about four seconds.
- Put the terms on the paper. Late fee, payment schedule, and a stop-work clause saying work pauses while payments are past due. That last one turns pausing into a term of the deal instead of a standoff. The free contract generator writes all three.
Retainage deserves its own line if you do commercial work. It typically runs 5% to 10% held back until the job closes out, and it's the money most likely to quietly never arrive. California's SB-61 capped private construction retainage at 5% effective January 2026, which is a useful benchmark to negotiate against even if you work elsewhere.
What about small claims?
It's built for exactly this. Limits run roughly $2,500 to $25,000 depending on the state, filing usually costs $30 to $100, you don't need a lawyer, and hearings are short. Bring the signed contract or estimate, the invoice, photos of the finished work, and your dated reminder trail — which is precisely what the four stages above build for you, in order, with dates.
Two practical notes. First, in a lot of cases the filing itself is what gets you paid; people who ignore four messages respond to a summons. Second, a judgment is not money. Collecting on it is a separate job involving garnishment or liens, and it's the part nobody warns you about. That's the honest reason to make stage 1 through 3 land properly: the goal is to never need stage 4, and never, ever need a courthouse.
What this tool cannot do
Plainly, because the paid tools in this category are not plain about it:
- It cannot send anything. No emails go out, no texts go out. You copy the message and send it from your own phone or your own inbox. Sending on a schedule needs a server and a mail reputation, and that's what Chaser's £199 a month buys.
- It cannot read your accounting software. No QuickBooks or Xero sync. You paste your invoices into the aging box yourself.
- It cannot take the payment. No card processing, no ACH.
- It cannot file a lien or mail anything certified. It prints a letter; you take it to the post office.
- It cannot give you proof of service. That is genuinely what Levelset's $59 buys, and if you are heading toward litigation it may be worth the money. The letter itself is not the valuable part. The affidavit is.
Common questions
When should I send the first payment reminder?
The day after the due date, or inside the first week at the latest. A short warm note sent early reads as organised rather than pushy, and most late invoices really are just forgetfulness. The longer you wait the more awkward the ask becomes and the less urgent it feels on the other end.
How much can I charge as a late fee?
1.5% per month, which is 18% a year, is the standard defensible figure for business-to-business work in most US states, prorated by days late. Two conditions apply. The fee is only enforceable if it was in your contract or invoice terms before the work, and state usury and finance-charge laws cap what you can charge, with the caps varying a lot between states and between consumer and commercial jobs.
Can I add a late fee that was not in my original terms?
Generally no. A fee the customer never agreed to is hard to enforce and it turns a payment conversation into an argument about the fee. Mention it as your policy going forward, then put a late-fee line on every contract and invoice from now on so the next one sticks.
What is a demand letter and do I need a lawyer to send one?
A demand letter is a formal written notice that states what is owed, why, and what happens if it is not paid by a specific date. You do not need a lawyer to send one, and this page prints one for free. Levelset charges $59 per recipient for the same thing. What their $59 actually buys that this does not is proof of service, which matters if the case ends up in front of a judge.
Should I send the demand letter by certified mail?
Yes, certified with return receipt requested. The letter is not the valuable part, the receipt is. It proves the person received a written demand on a specific date, which is exactly what a small-claims judge wants to see, and it is often the thing that finally produces payment.
Is it legal to stop work over an unpaid invoice?
It is safest when your contract contains a stop-work clause saying work pauses while payments are past due. Without one, walking off a job mid-contract can create its own dispute and hand the customer a counterclaim. Pausing future or scheduled work is much lower risk than abandoning work in progress, and in practice it is the pressure that works most often.
What if the customer never pays at all?
Small-claims court is built for this. Limits run roughly $2,500 to $25,000 depending on the state, filing usually costs $30 to $100, and you do not need a lawyer. Bring the signed contract or estimate, the invoice, photos of the finished work, and your dated reminder trail. Often the filing itself is what gets you paid. Bear in mind that winning a judgment and collecting on it are two different jobs.
Why does construction get paid so much later than everyone else?
Because the bottleneck is approval, not billing. Construction runs 83 days DSO against about 60 days across all industries, and 82% of contractors now wait more than 30 days, up from 49% two years earlier. Research from CompanyCam identifies three chokepoints that all happen before the invoice goes out: unclear scope, undocumented change orders, and disputed completion. Their conclusion is worth memorising, that faster invoicing software cannot resolve a scope disagreement.
Does an aging report actually help me get paid?
It tells you where to spend your Tuesday morning. Most people chase whoever annoyed them most recently. An aging report shows you which invoices are oldest and biggest, and those two together are almost always where the real money is. Across US B2B, 43% of invoice value is overdue and about 5% is eventually written off, and the write-offs come out of the 90-plus bucket.
Does this tool send the reminders for me?
No, and nothing that runs entirely in your browser can. You copy the message and send it from your own phone or your own email. Sending on a schedule needs a server and a mail reputation, which is what Chaser sells starting around £199 a month. This page writes the words, does the maths, and prints the letter.
Is this payment reminder tool free and private?
Yes. No signup, no email gate, and nothing you type leaves your browser. The messages, the late-fee maths, the demand letter and the aging report are all generated on your device. The invoices you paste into the aging box are never transmitted anywhere, because there is no server on the other end of that box.
These templates and calculations are general information for planning, not legal or tax advice. Collection practices, interest caps, lien deadlines, and communication rules vary by state.
More free tools: the full tools directory, the invoice generator with no annual cap, and the review link generator for the customers who did pay and were happy about it.
Slow payers respect an operation that looks organised
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