I have now discussed this invoice with xyz and have been asked to pay you for the first three days, making a total of £xyz. Your cheque has gone out first class in last night’s post. The dispute had slightly delayed processing.

When you dispute an invoice, you’re supposed to actually contact the person who you’re disputing the invoice with. Seeing as that’s not that case and I don’t particularly like you or your company, I’m going to sting you for every penny you owe me.

There’s only one thing worse than working for a toss piece. And that’s working for a toss piece who doesn’t pay you on time. I have very rigid rules when it comes to payment, like most self-employed people. I expect payment within thirty days, which I feel is a reasonable time scale.

I got told about a great website some while back, payontime.co.uk. It details your legal rights to charge interest on late payments. It has a great downloadable PDF, which outlines how you should format invoices and approach charging people.

My invoices have for some time included some text in the footer telling people I will charge interest for late payments. This is predominantly used as a deterrent, and it normally works wonders. Here’s the text in full.

I understand and will exercise my statutory right to interest under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. Invoices not paid within the credit terms stated above will incur interest.

Unfortunately some people think the text is there just for show and that it won’t be acted upon. If you use this kind of text in your invoices you need to be willing to follow it up. I have the next step planned if I still don’t receive any payment; A CCJ, which they most definitely won’t want to have to their name.

Adrian asked me to post this picture he took when attempting to get some cash at a local Tesco store.

The cash point was frozen on the “Windows is shutting down” logo.
I can’t understand why any company would trust windows to be their operating system of choice for operating a device that handles money. That’s just asking for trouble!

My friend Andy pointed me to Note Trace, a website one of his friends has setup as a point of proof.

notetrace.co.uk allows you to track the geographical location of your bank notes. Using the unique serial numbers on the notes, you can see the path the note takes and the shops/locations the transactions take place.

It’s a nice idea, but it has one flaw and that’s to trust other people to input the data for it to work.
It could be interesting to see how this progresses. It’s got a nice user interface and seems quite easy to use so we’ll see what happens!