How do I get paid faster as a tradie?

The job finished on Thursday. The invoice went out on Sunday night, the customer has had it for weeks, and now you are deciding whether today is the day you ring and ask again. It is not just you. Disputes over payments made up 42% of the requests for help the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman received in the 2023 to 2024 financial year, well above the 26% average between 2016 and 2024.

Most of how fast you get paid is decided before the job starts. One line on every quote that says when payment is due and how to pay means the customer agreed to it before you picked up a tool. Chasing someone about terms they said yes to is a much easier message to send than chasing someone about terms they have never seen.

The second thing is the gap between finishing and invoicing. An invoice written on site, the day the job ends, lands while the customer can still see the work and still feels good about it. The same invoice sent from the kitchen table days later is competing with everything else in their inbox.

Then the reminders. If you invoice through Xero, it has invoice reminders built in under the invoice settings, and they go out whether anyone remembers or not. Write them once in your own words so they sound like you and not like a bank: a friendly heads up before the due date, a plain note when it is late, and a firmer one after that. No accounting software? The same few messages saved as a note in your phone turn chasing into copy, paste, send.

The handful who still have not paid after the reminders are the ones worth a phone call, and by then you know the gentle version was never going to work for them. That is a much shorter call list than ringing everyone.

A Three Fixes report looks at how you quote, invoice and chase today and writes the terms line and the reminder wording in your voice, with the steps to put them into the tools you already use.