Your reminders are going out on schedule and the same names keep sitting there overdue. Before you add a fourth email, two findings from Adfin's own book point somewhere else: payments cluster on the due date you set, and lateness concentrates in a minority of your customers. So sending more to everybody is unlikely to be the lever.
In this article
The short version
- 22.0% of customer-initiated payments land on the due date itself, so the date you set carries a lot of this (Adfin platform data, 59,777 paid invoices).
- 5.5% went out already past their due date, and a weekend due date is paid on time about six percent less often (Adfin platform data).
- 27.4% of repeat payers were never late once, and the 24.3% late most of the time produced 51.9% of late payments (Adfin platform data).
- Adfin's warehouse holds no chasing-event data, so no claim about reminder timing or channel comes from it, ours included.
What's probably happening
Usually it looks like this. Day one, day seven and day fourteen go out on time, most of your ledger clears, and twenty or thirty of the same names stay put.
Two findings say look past the sequence. Of the on-time customer-initiated payments in Adfin's book, 33.5% arrived on the due date itself, and 22.0% of all 59,777 payments landed on the day they were due (Adfin platform data). Payments cluster hard on the date you choose, upstream of any reminder.
And the customers who miss aren't spread evenly. Among 1,359 business-customer pairs with five or more customer-initiated payments, 27.4% were never late once while the 24.3% late at least 80% of the time accounted for 51.9% of all late payments (Adfin platform data). Those pairs qualified by paying five times themselves, a selected group, since a reliable card payer is exactly who most businesses would have moved onto a mandate, so read the shape and not the proportions.
Four checks are worth running before a fourth reminder, cheapest first.
Check the due dates you set
You control this part on your own, and it takes an afternoon. Pull last quarter's invoices and see where the due dates landed.
Invoices due on a Saturday were paid on time 60.4% of the time and Sunday 60.6%, against 65.8% to 67.2% Monday to Friday (Adfin platform data, 59,777 paid customer-initiated invoices). A Saturday deadline means Friday was your customer's last working chance to act. And 5.5% of those invoices were issued with a due date already past (Adfin platform data), and no reminder rescues an invoice that arrived overdue.
Check the terms too. On-time payment rose with the length of terms, from 59.5% on same-day terms to 76.4% at 8 to 14 days (Adfin platform data). Read that as an association and not an instruction to extend terms. The full table is in the UK Getting Paid Report.
Check who is receiving them
An invoice can be perfectly chased and still be with somebody who has no authority to pay it.
Take three stuck accounts and ask who approves payment there and whether your invoice reached them. Reminders going to an accounts inbox that forwards nothing have been talking to a filing cabinet. Send to a named person, copy the inbox, and check the invoice carries the reference your customer's system needs.
Check how hard it is to pay you
Some of what reads as reluctance is a payment route that takes six steps.
Many of your customers move fast when they can: 23.0% of customer-initiated payments arrived within an hour of the request and 42.7% within a day (Adfin platform data, 59,778 paid invoices). That clock starts when a person sees the request, so anything between reading and paying lands on your cycle. A link opening the invoice with the amount and reference filled in removes most of it, as payment links covers.
For recurring work, ask whether these clients should be paying manually at all. Where a mandate already existed when the invoice was raised, 97.0% of invoices were paid against 90.3% without one, and 1.3% were still open six months later against 5.4% (Adfin platform data, 152,689 invoices created in the seven months to 31 January 2026). That comparison isn't controlled, but a client you chase monthly is a collection arrangement question, and how to tell clients you're moving them to direct debit has the wording.
Find out which names produce the lateness
List every client with five or more invoices, work out what share were paid after the due date, and rank the list. Most people find ten or twenty names producing the bulk of the problem. Your ageing holds the raw material, and how to read an aged debtor report covers the buckets. Then your reminders can differ: earlier contact for the names with a record of missing, a lighter touch for the rest, which how to set different chasing rules for different clients covers.
Age tells you where the effort belongs. Among late customer-initiated payments the median delay was 8 days, 14.1% were one day late and 48.3% a week or less, while 7.1% ran past 90 days (Adfin platform data, 20,533 late payments). Half of it resolves itself, and your money is at risk in the oldest slice.
Where a conversation replaces a reminder
At about three weeks over, a written reminder stops telling your customer anything they don't know. A call does two things an email can't: it tells you which situation you're in, and it gets you a date. Wording that tends to work, in the manner of difficult payment conversations:
- "Invoice 1042 for £1,200 was due on the 30th and it's still showing unpaid. Is there something holding it up at your end?"
- "If cash is tight this month, I can split it over three payments starting Friday. Would that work?"
- "So payment goes out on the 14th. I'll note that, and I'll come back to you on the 15th if it hasn't arrived."
Three cases come out of those calls. A query needs answering, since reminders tend to harden a dispute. A client who can't pay now will often keep to an instalment arrangement. A client who put you at the back of the queue responds to a named date.
Where you get nothing, the formal position comes next: statutory interest at the Bank of England base rate plus 8%, running at 11.75% as of June 2026, and fixed compensation of £40, £70 or £100 by the size of the debt. Recovering overdue debt: the steps in order sets out the rest.
What nobody can tell you about reminder timing
You'll find pages claiming Tuesday at 10am is the best moment to send a reminder, or that SMS does better than email by some figure. Treat those as invented unless a method comes with them.
Adfin can't fill that gap either. There are no chasing events in its warehouse: nothing records what was sent, when, or through which channel. So no figure here ranks reminder timings or channels, and even the clustering on the due date can't be credited to a reminder instead of your customer's own diary.
Your own records answer something narrower: what this client replied to before, and how quickly they paid. Whether automating it helps is in do automated payment reminders actually work, and the sequence in dates and actions is in how to chase an unpaid invoice.
Common questions
Why do clients ignore payment reminders? Often because the reminder isn't the obstacle. The invoice may be with somebody who can't approve it, the payment route may take effort, the due date may already have passed, or the client pays late whatever arrives.
How many payment reminders should I send? A confirmation before the due date, a short reminder the day after it, a second a week later, then a phone call. Beyond three written messages in one channel, changing medium carries the escalation better.
Is there a best time or day to send a payment reminder? There's no reliable answer, and Adfin can't publish one either, because its warehouse holds no record of chasing events. Any page giving a specific hour without a method is guessing. One client's own reply history is what you can act on.
Should I stop chasing and move the client to direct debit? If you invoice them regularly and chase every month, that's worth considering. In Adfin's book, invoices raised where a mandate already existed were paid 97.0% of the time against 90.3% without one, though that comparison isn't controlled.
What do I do when the same clients are always late? Rank your clients by how often they paid after the due date, over their last five or more invoices. In Adfin's book the worst 24.3% of repeat payers produced 51.9% of late payments, so a small group usually explains most of it. Treat that group differently.
When does a late invoice need a phone call instead of an email? Around two to three weeks over, or sooner on a large invoice. A reminder by then repeats what your customer knows, while a call tells you whether it's a query, a cash problem or a queue.
Sources
- GOV.UK — claim debt recovery costs on a late commercial payment (accurate as of August 2026)
This article explains how to work through unpaid invoices and is not legal advice. The statutory interest rate moves with the Bank of England base rate, so check the current position before relying on a figure. Last updated August 2026.
