Days to get paid is largely within your control, and almost all of it is process rather than persuasion.
The businesses that get paid quickly rarely have better customers. They ask sooner, more easily, and more consistently.
Remove your own delay first
A meaningful share of the wait is on your side of the line and invisible because it feels like admin.
Invoice the day the work finishes. Month-end invoicing adds up to four weeks to every job before the customer has done anything.
Get the details right first time. A wrong address, a missing purchase-order number or an unclear description sends the invoice into a query queue and adds weeks. Larger customers will not chase you for the correction.
Send it to the person who pays, not the person who booked the work. In anything commercial these are different people and the invoice sitting with the wrong one is the single most common silent delay.
Make paying easy
Take card payment on site for work that finishes on site. It removes the receivable entirely.
Put a payment link on the invoice. Any friction — a transfer to arrange, a cheque to write — pushes it into somebody's "later".
Take deposits on anything with material cost up front. It funds the work and it filters out customers who were never going to pay.
See invoicing setup.
Ask early and on a schedule
Chase at seven days past due, not thirty. A short, unemotional message recovers a large share of what would otherwise age badly, because most late payment is administrative rather than deliberate.
Automate it. Reminders work because they go out on time regardless of how busy the week is. Nobody has to decide to have the conversation, and that decision is what does not get made.
Escalate on a rhythm rather than by mood: friendly, then firm, then final.
Set the terms up front
Say the terms on the quote, not just the invoice.
Shorter terms if you can. Net 14 gets paid sooner than net 30 in businesses where nobody negotiated.
Stage payments on long work — a deposit, a progress payment, a balance — so you are never funding months of work out of your own cash.
The one control that matters most
Do not start the next job for a customer who has not paid for the last one.
It is uncomfortable once and it prevents nearly every serious bad debt, because large unpaid balances are almost always built from several jobs run while an earlier invoice sat unpaid.