You did the work. Getting paid for it shouldn’t be the hard part

You finish the job. You do it well. Then you send the invoice, and the wait begins. A day passes, then a week. You start wondering whether to say something. You draft the message, delete it, soften it, and send it. And you tell yourself this is just part of running your own thing.

The reason invoices sit unpaid usually isn’t that the customer won’t pay – it’s that paying you is mildly annoying. You send a PDF or a sort code over WhatsApp or through your accounting software, and now they have to open their banking app, copy the numbers, type the reference correctly, and actually press send.

All of it is easy to put off until “later”, and later has a habit of becoming three weeks. According to research conducted by Sage, last year, 44% of all small business invoices were paid late. The Office of the Small Business Commissioner says the scourge of late payments costs the UK economy around £11 billion every year.

We’ve included the fix to this in our brand new Startups Business Toolkit: a built-in payment link designed to remove that friction entirely.

Send your next invoice with a pay-now link

Professional invoices, automatic reminders, card payments — all for free.

Try Free Invoices

Make paying you the easy option

When your invoice carries a built-in payment link – pay now, by card, in two taps – settling up stops being a chore your customer has to find time for. They tap, they pay, you both move on.

The difference this makes is striking. Stripe, which handles payments for businesses around the world, reports that 87% of the invoices sent through its system are paid within 24 hours, and that customers pay roughly three times faster when offered one-tap options like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Research conducted by accountancy platform Xero has found much the same: businesses that add online payment to their invoices get paid up to twice as fast.

With the Startups Business Toolkit, you can create invoices with a custom payment link, decked out in your business’s branding.

Give people the way they want to pay

There’s a simple advantage hiding here, too. According to accounting platform Xero, Most customers would prefer to tap a card than fiddle with a bank transfer – 86% say card is their preferred way to pay – yet only around 55% of small businesses actually offer it.

Just letting people pay the way they already want to puts you ahead of more than half the field, and quietly makes your one-person business feel as easy to deal with as a big one.

Look professional, chase less, get paid sooner

This is exactly what the Get Paid side of the new Startups Business Toolkit is built for. You can send a branded, professional invoice in about 60 seconds, with a payment link built in so clients pay by card or bank transfer in a couple of taps.

Keep on top of your finances by tracking which invoices have been paid with the Startups Business Toolkit.

If an invoice does run late, automatic reminders do the chasing for you – politely, on time, so you never have to send that message again. And a single dashboard shows you exactly what’s been paid and what’s still outstanding, so you always know where you stand.

Our invoicing and payment tools are available for free, with all payments handled securely by FCA-regulated payments processor Stripe. So why not take it out for a spin? The next invoice you send could be the last one you have to chase.

Send your next invoice with a pay-now link

Professional invoices, automatic reminders, card payments — free to start.

Try Free Invoices