The Card You Should Have on File Before the Work Starts
Getting paid faster isn't about chasing harder — it's about deciding how you'll be paid before you touch the job. Here's how to make that decision once.
Most firms make the same quiet mistake: they finish the work, then start thinking about how they'll get paid for it. The engagement letter is signed, the return is lodged, the BAS is filed — and only then does anyone ask, right, how do we actually collect on this one?
By that point your options have narrowed. The client has what they wanted. The urgency has moved to their side of the table, and it has left yours entirely. You send an invoice, you wait, you send a reminder, you wait some more. The money is real, the work was real, but the mechanism for getting paid was an afterthought bolted on at the end.
The firms that get paid fastest don't chase harder. They decide how a client pays — and when — before the first piece of work begins. That decision belongs at onboarding, right next to scope and fees, not in a reminder email three weeks after the job is done.
Payment is a policy, not a negotiation
When you leave payment method to the end, every invoice becomes a small negotiation. Some clients pay by bank transfer on their own schedule. Some wait for the statement. Some need you to "resend the details." Each one has quietly trained you to accept whatever friction they bring, because raising it after the fact feels awkward.
The fix is to treat payment method as a term of doing business, set once, applied to everyone. In practice that means one of two things for most compliance-heavy firms:
- Card or direct debit on file — captured at onboarding, charged automatically when the invoice issues or the work completes.
- Pay-to-proceed — the client authorises payment as part of accepting the engagement, so collection is a formality, not a fresh request.
Neither of these is aggressive. They're standard in software, in gyms, in insurance, in almost every service a client already pays for. The only reason they feel unusual in accounting is that the profession has spent decades doing the work first and asking for money last.
Where the card gets captured matters
Capturing a payment method only works if it happens at the natural moment — when the client is already saying yes. That moment is the engagement letter. The client is reviewing scope, agreeing to fees, signing. It is the one point in the relationship where they are actively committing to work with you.
If you can attach payment authorisation to that same step, you've solved collection before it becomes a problem. In Finye, the engagement letter, e-signing and invoicing sit in the same system, so the decision the client makes about scope is connected to how they'll pay for it. You're not sending a separate "can you set up payment" email a week later, hoping they get to it. The two-way Xero sync means the invoice and payment status flow straight through to your ledger without re-keying.
What this looks like in a real workflow
Consider a firm running recurring BAS and annual tax work for a small business client:
- At onboarding, the engagement letter is signed and a card is stored against the client record.
- Recurring jobs are templated, so each BAS quarter creates the same work item, the same fee and the same invoice automatically.
- When the job completes, the invoice issues and the stored payment method is charged — no reminder, no chase, no third email.
- The payment lands in Xero, reconciled against the invoice, because the systems are talking to each other.
The point of good client accounting software isn't to send reminders faster. It's to build a workflow where reminders become unnecessary because the payment mechanism was decided upfront and wired into the work itself.
The objection you're expecting
The worry is always the same: my clients won't put a card on file. Some won't. But far fewer than you think, and the ones who resist are often telling you something useful about how they'll pay you later, too.
Frame it as the default, not the exception. "We collect payment automatically when work completes — here's where to enter your details" reads very differently from "would you be open to maybe setting up a card?" One is how your firm operates. The other is a favour you're asking for. Clients follow the confidence of the framing.
For clients who genuinely can't or won't, you keep a fallback — but it's the fallback, not the norm. The mistake most firms make is treating the exception as the standard because it feels more comfortable in the moment.
Attach payment to the work, not the calendar
Once a method is on file, the second decision is when to charge. Tie it to the work, not to an arbitrary billing run at month's end. A return lodged on the 14th shouldn't wait until the 30th to be invoiced and collected — that's two weeks of value you delivered sitting uncollected for no reason other than habit.
When your practice management software knows the state of every job, the invoice can trigger off the work itself. Job marked complete, invoice issues, stored method charged. The gap between delivering value and collecting on it shrinks from weeks to nothing. Your WIP stops silently ageing into debtors because the moment work is done is the moment it's billed.
The compounding effect
None of this is about squeezing clients. It's about removing the dozens of tiny decisions and delays that live between finishing a job and seeing the money. Each one seems small. Together they're the difference between a firm that collects in days and one that carries thirty, sixty, ninety days of unpaid work as a permanent tax on its cash flow.
The card on file, captured at onboarding and charged when work completes, turns collection from an event into a background process. You stop thinking about getting paid, which is exactly the point. The system that manages your clients, your engagements and your work should also be the system that gets you paid for it — quietly, on time, without a single reminder.
Decide how you'll be paid before you start the work. Do it once, apply it to everyone, and let the workflow carry it from there.