UK small firms now wait an average of 27 days to be paid after sending an invoice, and nearly half of all SME invoices are overdue. In construction and trades it is worse, with real payment times running closer to 61 days against 30-day terms. The government’s new late payment bill, announced in March, will cap terms at 60 days, add mandatory interest, and give the Small Business Commissioner power to fine persistent late payers. That helps, but it is aimed mostly at large firms paying smaller suppliers, and it will not take effect until late 2026 at the earliest. If you want to get paid faster before then, the one lever you fully control is how quickly a finished job turns into a paid invoice.
Where the days go
The slow part is rarely the customer. It is the gap between doing the work and sending the bill. The job finishes on Tuesday, the paperwork sits in a van until the weekend, the invoice gets typed up on Sunday night, and the clock everyone complains about only starts then. Add a quote that took three days to write in the first place and you have lost a week before the customer has even seen a number.
Then there is the chasing. Across the economy, businesses spend around 133 million hours a year chasing late payments, roughly 86 hours each for those affected. That is a person on the phone instead of on a job, every week.
How to get paid faster without buying more software
This is a workflow problem before it is a software problem. The aim is simple: quote on the day, invoice the moment the job is signed off, and let reminders run themselves. Three changes do most of the work.
Invoice from where the job lives. Trade and service tools like Tradify, ServiceM8 and Jobber carry the detail from the quote straight into the invoice and let you send it from your phone before you leave site. No retyping, no weekend admin.
Put a payment button on the invoice. Adding online card payment knocks about eight days off the average time to get paid. It removes the “I’ll do a transfer later” delay that quietly costs you weeks.
Turn on automatic reminders. Scheduled chasers lift payment rates by around 30 percent and take the awkward follow-up off your plate. Most invoicing tools already include this, and most businesses leave it switched off.
None of this means buying another tool. If you already pay for job management or accounting software, the quote-to-invoice flow and payment links are almost certainly sitting there unused, much like the other tools in your stack that never quite connect. Getting them working together is also your best defence against the kind of invoice and payment fraud that thrives on messy, manual billing.
The point
Write down how a job currently travels from “finished” to “paid” in your business. If that journey runs through a van, a kitchen table and a Sunday night, no new law is going to get you paid faster. Your own workflow will.
If you want a clear view of where time and cash are leaking between your quoting, job and invoicing tools, the free audit at digilyse.co takes about ten minutes.
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