Invoice is 45 days late and the client keeps saying accounting will handle it Getting Paid

Stop talking to your contact about money. He does not pay invoices, he has no authority over it, and every friendly chase resets the clock without moving anything. The sequence that works:

• Email accounts payable directly, not your contact. Ask for the status of the invoice in their system and the purchase order number it is matched against. Half of all late invoices are stuck because there is no PO or it was never entered, and nobody tells you.
• Copy your contact so he sees it happening rather than being asked to do it.
• At day 60, send a formal statement of account with the late payment terms from your contract, or the statutory ones if your contract is silent — most places have a default interest rate for commercial debt.
• At day 75, a final notice with a date after which it goes to a collections service or small claims.
  Be polite and completely unmoved throughout. Almost everything settles at step one or step three.

Turn the work off if your terms let you, and if they do not, add that clause for next time. Nothing accelerates an accounts department like a stakeholder discovering the thing has stopped working. Check the contract first though — doing it without the right to is an excellent way to turn a payment delay into a legal dispute.

Charge a deposit next time. 40 or 50 percent up front and the remainder before final files. It filters out the clients who cannot pay, and the ones who can do not blink at it. I lost exactly one prospect to this in five years and they were the one I would have been chasing for a year.

Keep everything in email from here on. Friendly phone calls feel productive and produce no evidence. If you do call, follow it with a short summary email that starts with to confirm what we discussed.

Check the invoice itself is not the problem — wrong legal entity, missing tax number, wrong address, sent to a person rather than the AP inbox. I had one sit for two months over a wrong VAT number that nobody could be bothered to tell me about.