Chasing your own fees: the credit control nobody owns

The reason it does not get done #

Credit control in a practice fails for a specific and very human reason. The person who knows the invoice is unpaid is usually the person who has the relationship with the client, and raising money with somebody you are about to ask for their records feels like spending goodwill you will need next month. So it waits.

What the law already gives you #

Practices are often surprised by how much statutory backing sits behind a late invoice, because they have never had cause to look. From GOV.UK guidance read on 19 September 2026:

• Where no payment date is agreed, a payment is late 30 days after the customer receives the invoice or after the service is delivered, whichever is later.
• Where a date is agreed, it must usually be within 30 days for public authorities and 60 days for business transactions, with longer permitted only where it is fair to both businesses.
• Statutory interest for business to business transactions is 8 per cent plus the Bank of England base rate, and cannot be claimed where the contract sets a different rate.

Those fixed sums are chargeable once per payment. Whether to use any of that against a particular client is a commercial and professional decision, and enforcement is a matter for your own legal advice. The point here is narrower: the timing of when an invoice becomes chaseable is defined in days, and days are arithmetic.

Separate the ledger from the conversation #

Every credit control process contains two completely different activities, and practices lose because they treat them as one.

The left column is a dated list. It is the same shape as the compliance calendar on the deadline reminders page and the same shape as the records chase on the records chasing page. The right column is judgement and should stay with a partner. What sinks practices is the left column being reconstructed by hand, in a hurry, when cash gets tight.

Three questions worth answering this month #

1. What is your actual debtor days figure, as opposed to the one you assume?

   Most practices have the data and have never looked at the trend.

2. At what point does a reminder currently go out, and who decides?

   If the answer is “when somebody notices”, that is the finding.

3. Which clients have an unpaid invoice and an imminent filing deadline?

   That intersection is where a practice does its most expensive work for free, and it is a query against two lists you already hold.

The line we do not cross #

Nothing on this page is legal advice, and a practice considering statutory interest, debt recovery costs or ceasing to act should take its own advice, particularly where filing deadlines and professional obligations to an existing client are involved.

What is straightforward is the diagnosis. A practice with a current, reliable view of who owes what and for how long makes its credit control decisions calmly and early. A practice that has to assemble that view by hand makes them late and under pressure, which is when the relationship damage actually happens.

If you want to know what assembling it by hand costs you, the payment chasing calculator and the rest of the free tools are a start, and the free audit does it properly.