Collections is the cheapest capital
you will ever raise.
For founders whose customers pay late. A round costs equity and a quarter of your attention, while an overdue invoice costs an email. This playbook is invoicing, terms and collections: the cheapest capital you will ever raise.
// 34 PAGES · FIVE PARTS · THREE CHECKLISTS · FREE
Seven things to know about getting paid.
Each is a mechanism you can plan around, and the guide is plain about the limit.
It is money you have already earned, at no cost
Every other source of cash carries a price. Equity costs ownership permanently.
Cash conversion is a real constraint, and growth makes it worse
The gap between paying for the work and being paid for it is a hole you have to fund, and it scales with revenue. This is the counterintuitive part: the faster you grow, the more cash the gap consumes, which is why profitable, growing companies run out of money.
Late payment is a habit that hardens on both sides
The first invoice sets the pattern. Pay late with no consequence and that becomes the schedule; a customer's accounts payable function will quite reasonably prioritise the suppliers who follow up.
Prompt, professional collections is a signal, not an irritation
Founders fear that chasing damages relationships. In practice, a company that invoices accurately and follows up predictably reads as organised and serious; one that invoices late, gets details wrong and then goes quiet reads as chaotic — and chaotic suppliers get deprioritised, not protected.
It removes an entire category of runway anxiety
A large receivables balance is a permanent low-level uncertainty: you know roughly what you are owed, you do not know when it will arrive, and so the runway number carries a fudge factor.
It tells you which customers are worth having
Payment behaviour is one of the clearest available signals about a customer relationship. Chronic late payment often accompanies other patterns: excessive support demand, scope creep, and the loudest complaints.
And now the honest limit, in two parts
Chasing badly does real damage — an aggressive, impersonal or premature escalation over an invoice that was late because you sent it to the wrong person costs you far more than the money.
Five parts, and a last page.
Parts one to five are the thinking and the doing, worth your time even if you never touch a piece of software. The last pages show how to run the routine.
Why collections is the cheapest capital
Decide before you invoice
Invoice so that you get paid
Chase well
The checklists and the mistakes
Do it all in one place
Nine mistakes, all of them avoidable.
None is about customers being difficult. They are failures of terms and routine, which is good news, because both can be set up in advance.
Treating collections as admin
It is the cheapest capital available, with no dilution and no interest, and it is the only source of cash with no downside whatsoever.
Invoicing late
The work finished and the invoice went out eleven days later. That is runway given away for nothing, before any customer has done anything wrong.
Getting the invoice details wrong
A missing reference does not get rejected loudly — it sits, invisible, while you assume it is being processed.
Never asking for a deposit
The strongest position is not chasing well, it is not needing to. The request is normal and the reaction is almost always milder than the fear.
Not chasing the first late payment
The first one sets the schedule for the entire relationship, and the discipline is cheapest at the very start.
Chasing only by email
A short call resolves most stalled invoices in minutes by surfacing the real obstacle. Founders avoid it because it feels confrontational, and it almost never is.
Opening with an accusation
Most late payment is a process failure. An accusatory message guarantees you will never be told what actually went wrong.
Chasing a dispute
If they believe they do not owe it, this is not a payment conversation and escalating will make it considerably worse.
Never stopping work
Continuing to deliver while unpaid is lending more to someone who has not repaid the last loan, and it teaches the customer that terms are decorative.
Thirty-four pages.
Yours in one click.
Five parts, three checklists and the nine mistakes. One email with the link, no drip sequence, and we do not sell the list.