The Payment Terms You Never Set: Getting Paid Without the Chase

Slow payment usually isn't a collections problem — it's a terms problem. Here's how to design payment terms into your client accounting workflow so getting paid is automatic.

Ask most practice owners why a particular invoice is 47 days overdue, and you'll get a story about the client — cash flow, a partner who's away, an email that got buried. All plausible. But scratch the surface and you'll usually find the real issue sits earlier, at the point where terms should have been set and never were.

Getting paid faster is rarely about chasing harder. It's about deciding, up front, exactly how and when money moves — and then building those decisions into your client accounting software so nobody has to enforce them by hand.

Default terms are terms you didn't choose

Every invoice you send has payment terms. The question is whether you chose them or inherited them. If your accounting client management software drops "Net 30" on every invoice because that's the template default, you've made a decision about your firm's cash flow without ever discussing it.

Net 30 made sense in an era of posted cheques and monthly cheque runs. For a compliance job that a client asked you to do and that delivers clear value on completion, 30 days is a long time to wait — and it's an invitation for the invoice to slide down someone's to-do list.

Before you fix anything else, look at what your invoices actually say:

What are the default terms, and did anyone choose them?
Are terms consistent across clients, or does every job get billed differently?
Do your engagement letters mention payment terms at all, or do they appear for the first time on the invoice?

That last point matters more than it seems. If the first time a client sees "due in 7 days" is on the invoice itself, you're negotiating terms after the work is done — the worst possible moment.

Terms belong in the engagement, not the invoice

Payment terms should be agreed before the work starts, not asserted afterwards. Your engagement letter is where the client accepts scope, fee and how they'll pay — all at once, while they still want you to do the job.

When terms live in a signed engagement letter, three things become true:

There's nothing to argue about later. The client agreed to 7-day terms — or a deposit, or payment on lodgment — in writing, before you lifted a finger.
You can collect payment details up front. A card on file, authorised at engagement, turns "please pay this invoice" into "we'll charge the card you provided."
Your team stops improvising. Nobody has to decide, invoice by invoice, what terms to offer. The engagement already said.

In Finye, engagement letters, e-signing and invoicing sit in the same system as the work itself. The terms a client signs off on flow through to how the job is billed, so what you agreed and what you invoice are the same thing — not two documents that drifted apart.

Match the moment of payment to the moment of value

The single biggest lever on how fast you get paid is when you ask. There's no law that says the invoice goes out after the work is finished and the client has moved on.

Think about the natural moments in a compliance job where the client feels the value most sharply:

At engagement. A deposit or upfront payment for a defined piece of work — a tax return, a set of financials — is entirely reasonable and increasingly expected.
At delivery or lodgment. The moment you lodge a return is the moment the client receives the thing they came for. Billing at that point, while the value is immediate, closes the gap between service and payment.
On a schedule, for recurring work. Bookkeeping, BAS and ongoing compliance shouldn't be invoiced by memory each month. A fixed monthly charge, ideally by direct debit or saved card, takes the whole question off the table.

None of this requires a tax return software or a ledger — it requires connecting the billing to the work. When your practice management software knows a job has moved to "lodged" or "delivered," it can raise the invoice at that exact status change, rather than waiting for someone to remember on Friday.

Make paying easier than not paying

Even with the right terms, a clunky payment experience adds days. If paying you means finding your bank details, opening online banking, keying in a reference and remembering to do it, you've built friction into every invoice.

The fix is a pay button. When your invoice carries a Stripe or Square link, the client pays in the moment they open it — the same session, no context-switch. That alone can move a payment from "end of month" to "this afternoon."

Better still is not asking at all. For recurring and pre-agreed work, a saved card or direct-debit authorisation means the payment happens on the date you agreed, with a receipt to follow. No reminder, no chase, no awkward third email.

Reconcile the loop, not just the invoice

Getting paid faster only sticks if you can see the whole picture at a glance — what's been billed, what's been paid, what's still sitting as unbilled work in progress. When invoicing lives in one system and your ledger lives in another, that visibility fractures, and payments get logged twice or not at all.

Finye's two-way Xero sync keeps invoices and payments consistent across both, so the invoice you raise against a job, the payment the client makes and the record in Xero all describe the same event. You're not reconciling by hand or wondering whether a paid invoice is genuinely settled — the client accounting side and the practice side agree.

A short checklist to set your terms deliberately

Decide your standard terms as a firm — and make them short. Seven days is a reasonable default for completed compliance work.
Put payment terms in the engagement letter, and collect a card on file at signing.
Bill at the moment of value: a deposit up front, and the balance at delivery or lodgment.
Move recurring work onto fixed monthly billing with a saved payment method.
Put a pay link on every invoice, and let saved cards handle the rest.
Keep invoicing and Xero in sync so the state of each account is never in question.

When terms are chosen deliberately, agreed in writing and enforced by the system rather than by a person, chasing stops being a weekly job. The invoice that used to sit unopened for a fortnight gets paid the day it lands — because you decided that outcome long before you sent it.