Getting paid by a business, not a person

A café orders forty of your candles for their Christmas shelf. A school wants ninety branded polo shirts. Somewhere in the reply comes a sentence you've never had from a normal customer: "Can you send us an invoice? We're on 30 days."

You'll get paid. You just won't get paid this week. A business doesn't pay when it decides to buy, it pays on a schedule, run by someone in accounts who has never spoken to you, against a document that has to be exactly right or it goes back in the pile. So: get a purchase order number before you deliver anything, put that number on the invoice, agree the payment terms in writing before you start, and plan your cash around 30 days rather than 3.

Almost everything that goes wrong here goes wrong before you deliver, not after. That's the useful thing to know, because it's the half you control.

What changes the moment your buyer is a company

A consumer decides and pays in the same motion. Two taps, done, and if they don't pay you don't ship. The whole rhythm of small selling is built on that.

A company splits the decision from the payment, and hands them to different people.

The person who emailed you wants your polo shirts. They may have no ability to move money at all. The person who moves money has never seen your samples, doesn't care that you're lovely to work with, and is measured on paying the right amounts to the right suppliers on the right day. Between those two people sits a process, and your invoice is a request to enter it.

That's not hostility. It's how an organisation stops one enthusiastic manager spending £4,000 on candles. But it means the skills that work on consumers, warmth, speed, good photos, do almost nothing here, and a completely different set of skills does everything.

	Selling to a person	Selling to a business
Who decides	The payer	Someone who isn't the payer
When you get paid	Before or on delivery	30 days after the invoice, sometimes 60
What they need from you	A price and a photo	An invoice with a PO number, bank details and a VAT position
Why payment stalls	They changed their mind	Your invoice is sitting in the wrong inbox
What gets you paid faster	Chasing the buyer	Talking to accounts payable
Order size	One	Forty, then forty again in March

That last row is why any of this is worth learning. One café buying forty candles four times a year outweighs a lot of individual orders, and it doesn't need a single new photograph.

Get the purchase order number before you deliver

A purchase order, PO for short, is the company's internal permission slip. Somebody with authority approved a spend of a specific amount with a specific supplier, and the system produced a number, usually something like PO-44219.

That number is the single most important thing in this whole article.

If your invoice has a matching PO number on it, accounts payable can pay it without asking anyone. If it doesn't, your invoice has to be manually chased back to whoever ordered, that person is on annual leave, and you're now four weeks behind before anybody has even disputed anything.

So ask for it, in writing, before you make anything:

Happy to do the ninety polos at £11 each, £990 total. Before I order the stock, could you send me the PO number so I can put it on the invoice? Saves your accounts team chasing it later.

The last clause matters. You're not asking for a favour, you're offering to make their colleague's job easier, and that framing gets a reply on the same day roughly every time.

Not every small company runs purchase orders. Plenty of independent cafés and one-office agencies don't. When there's no PO, ask instead for the exact name and email of the person who processes invoices, and for the trading name and registered address they want on the document. Get that in an email so it exists somewhere other than your memory.

What has to be on the invoice

For a UK sole trader who isn't VAT registered, HMRC's requirements are short and unfussy. Your name and any trading name you use, an address where you can be contacted, the customer's name and address, a unique invoice number that follows a sequence, a clear description of what you supplied, the date the goods or service were supplied, the date of the invoice, and the amount owed. That's it. It can be a Word document.

If you are VAT registered, the list grows: your VAT registration number, the VAT rate applied to each line, the net amount, the VAT amount and the gross total. Get one of those elements wrong and your customer's finance team can't reclaim the VAT, which is exactly the sort of thing that sends an invoice back to you rather than through. If registering is on your horizon or you're not sure whether you're near the threshold, VAT and invoicing anxiety is the honest version of that conversation. Check the current rules on gov.uk before you send your first one, because the detail changes and this article doesn't.

Then add four things HMRC doesn't require and accounts payable silently does:

1. The PO number, near the top, labelled PO number. Not buried in a description line.
2. Your bank details in full. Account name, sort code, account number. Not "details as before".
3. The payment terms, written as a date. "Payment due by 5 September 2026" gets paid. "Net 30" gets interpreted.
4. A reference the payment will carry. Your invoice number is fine. It's what turns a £990 credit in your statement into a matched order rather than a mystery.

Number four is the one small sellers skip, and it's the one that costs an evening later. The mechanics of matching money to orders are worked through in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived, and business payments are no different except that the amounts are bigger and the sender name is a company you've never heard of because it's the parent group.

Sequential invoice numbers matter more than they look. Starting at INV-001 tells your customer they're your first ever business client. Start somewhere unremarkable and never reuse a number, because a duplicate invoice number is one of the few things that will get your document rejected outright.

What net 30 actually means

Thirty days from the invoice date, in theory. In practice it means "thirty days, then the next payment run after that", and the payment run is the thing that governs your life.

Most companies pay suppliers in batches on fixed days. Some run weekly, plenty run twice a month, and a surprising number run once a month on a date like the 25th. If your invoice lands the day after a run, it waits for the next one, and thirty-day terms become forty-two days without anyone doing anything wrong.

So the question that gets you paid fastest is not "can you pay this yet". It's "which payment run does this fall into, and is there anything you still need from me before then?" Ask it once, early, of the accounts inbox rather than your buyer, and you'll learn the actual rhythm of that customer's money. After that you can time your invoices to land two days before the run instead of two days after, which on a monthly cycle is four weeks of cash for zero effort.

Other terms you'll meet:

• Net 60. Common from large retailers and some public bodies. Say yes if the order is worth it and no if it isn't, but price it in. Sixty days of £990 sitting elsewhere is a real cost to a small shop.
• Payment on delivery. Rare, and worth asking for on a first order with a company you don't know. "Because it's a first order I take payment on delivery, then move you onto 30 days from the second one" is a completely normal thing to say.
• 50% up front. Standard for anything made to order, and the right answer for personalised work. How to word it without sounding nervous is in taking a deposit before you start.
• Self-billing. The customer raises the invoice on your behalf. Big companies do it. It's fine, it means you stop controlling the invoice date, and you should read what they send you.

The law you have and probably won't use

In the UK, the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 gives you a statutory right to charge interest on a late business-to-business invoice, at 8% above the Bank of England base rate, plus fixed compensation for the cost of recovering it: £40 on debts under £1,000, £70 from £1,000 to £9,999.99, and £100 at £10,000 and over.

You almost certainly won't invoke it against a customer you want to keep. It's still worth knowing for two reasons.

The first is that a single line at the bottom of your invoice, "Late payment may incur statutory interest under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998", changes how your document is read by a finance team. It signals that you know the rules. It costs nothing and offends nobody, because it's simply true.

The second is that when a company is genuinely stringing you along at ninety days, this is the escalation that exists, and knowing it's there stops you from feeling powerless. Use it late, in writing, and only when you've decided the relationship is over anyway.

The chase ladder

Chasing is a process, not a mood. Run the same one every time and you'll never have to work out how annoyed to sound.

Day 0. Invoice goes out, to the accounts email, with the PO number, and copied to your buyer. Body of the email says the amount, the PO and the due date in one line.

Day 1. Confirm receipt. "Just checking this landed with the right inbox, no reply needed if so." Half of all late payments are invoices that were never in the system, and finding that out on day one instead of day thirty-five is worth more than any other habit in this article.

Due date minus 5. Short, friendly note to accounts. "Invoice 2181, £990, due on the 5th. Anything you need from me?" This is where you learn about the payment run.

Due date plus 1. "This one was due yesterday. Could you let me know which run it's in?" Still no temperature.

Due date plus 7. Copy in your buyer, the person who actually wanted the polo shirts. Not to shame anyone. Their internal nudge moves things that your external one can't.

Due date plus 21. Firm, written, with the statutory interest line quoted. Say what happens next and give a date.

The thing to hold on to through all of it: accounts payable are not ignoring you. You are, to them, one line in a queue of four hundred, and nearly every delay is a missing PO, a wrong email address, or an invoice that arrived after a run. Almost none of it is about you. Behave accordingly and you'll get paid faster than the supplier who sends angry emails on day thirty-two.

Worked example: Rosa, printed workwear, Bristol

Rosa prints workwear from a unit in Bedminster. Polos at £11, hoodies at £19, minimum order of twenty. Her consumer orders are small and instant. Her business orders are the ones that pay the rent.

Her first company order was ninety polos for a landscaping firm, £990. She made them, delivered them, emailed a PDF invoice to the man who'd ordered them, and heard nothing for six weeks. When she finally got through to their office manager, the answer was that the invoice had never reached accounts, there'd been no PO raised, and the man who ordered had left the company in the meantime. She got paid in week nine.

What she does now, on every business enquiry, before any stock is ordered:

• She asks for the PO number, the accounts email and the exact registered company name in one message.
• She quotes with the payment date spelled out: "Invoice on delivery, payment due 5 September."
• She sends the invoice to accounts and copies the buyer, and she checks on day one that it arrived.
• On any order over £750 from a company she hasn't worked with, she takes 50% up front. Nobody has ever refused, which surprised her.

Her average time to payment went from about seven weeks to twenty-nine days. The change that did most of the work was the day-one receipt check, which takes eleven seconds and catches the failure that used to cost her six weeks.

One more thing she learned the expensive way. The landscaping firm paid from an account in the name of their parent holding company, a name she'd never seen, and the payment sat in her statement for four days looking like a stranger's money. Ask, on the first order, what name their payments come out under. Write it down next to their record. You will not remember.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

Sailo is built for a buyer who orders and pays. It has no invoicing feature at all. No invoice numbering, no PO number field, no payment terms, no VAT breakdown, no statement of account, no reminder emails. If you need a compliant UK invoice, you're producing it somewhere else, and that's a real limitation rather than a roadmap hint.

What it does do reasonably well is the order itself. The business orders from your shop like anyone else, the bank transfer rail carries your account name, account number, IBAN and SWIFT plus a free-text instructions box, and you can put your terms and the PO reference request in that box. Sailo takes nothing on a bank transfer, ever, because the money never goes near it. The order sits at pending until you've seen the £990 in your own account and mark it paid.

For anything beyond that, use a proper invoicing tool or a template. Plenty of small sellers run their consumer orders through a shop and their four business customers through a spreadsheet and a PDF, and that's not a compromise, it's the right shape. What a good invoice actually looks like, line by line, is covered in invoices that get paid. The wider question of which rail to take money on at all is in how to take payment as a small seller.

Do this on your next business enquiry

Before you order stock or start making anything, send one message asking for four things: the PO number, the accounts payable email address, the exact registered company name and address, and confirmation of the payment terms as a date. Four lines. Nobody has ever been offended by it.

Then set two reminders in your phone the moment the invoice goes out: one for tomorrow to confirm it arrived, one for five days before the due date. Those two reminders are worth more than every chasing email you'll ever write.