We chase your late invoices for you. You just tap send.

The hardest part of being self-employed in trades isn't the work. It isn't the tax. It isn't even the paperwork. It's the bit where someone has had your work done — six weeks ago — and still hasn't paid you. And you have to be the one to bring it up.

The average UK invoice is now paid 54 days after it's issued. Construction had the most B2B bankruptcies of any UK sector last year — late payment was the single biggest contributor. £11bn drained out of the small-business economy every year, mostly from people whose names are on the door.

So we built something to take that conversation off your hands.

Honest Invoices now watches every invoice you send. The moment one becomes overdue, a quiet system kicks in:

• Detects which invoices are overdue and by how many days
• Drafts a professional chase email in your voice, in plain English
• Escalates through four progressively firmer stages as time passes
• References UK statutory rights (Late Payment Act, interest, compensation) at the right moment — not too early, never too aggressive
• Emails the draft to you for approval before anything goes to your client
• Sends it with one tap, BCCs you on the outgoing email, and keeps a tamper-evident audit trail

You don't have to set anything up. You don't have to write the email. You don't have to remember it's overdue. You just see “Chase draft ready for Mrs Khan's invoice” in your inbox, read it, and tap send.

Chasing a customer who's ignored you for three months in the same tone you'd use on day one doesn't work. Equally, hitting someone with a final-notice legal letter when they've just missed a date by accident is the fastest way to lose them as a customer. Late Payment Intelligence walks through four stages, automatically, so the tone always matches the situation.

A minimum five-day gap is enforced between stages, even for an invoice that's been overdue for ages with no chase history — so a client who's never heard from you can't suddenly receive four chase emails in four days.

Most AI products in this space will happily fire an automated chase straight to the customer. That's their feature.

We don't do that. The chase goes to youfirst, every time. You read it. You can edit it, regenerate it for a different angle, or skip it entirely if you know the client is actually in hospital this week. Only when you tap “Send to client” does it leave the building.

Two reasons:

• The trader's name is on the email. AI mistakes — wrong tone, misread context, factual slip — land on your reputation, not ours.
• You know things the system doesn't. Customer's wife was just ill. They paid by cheque you haven't banked yet. You agreed informally to extended terms over the phone. The system has to defer to you.

We think you'll find you approve about 90% of them with no changes. But the 10% where you don't is exactly why a human-in-the-loop matters.

If a client really doesn't pay — if eventually you have to take it to small claims or the Small Business Commissioner — what makes the difference between recovering the money and writing it off is the paper trail.

Every chase is logged. We record when it was drafted, when you approved it, when it was sent, the unique message ID from our email provider so you can prove it went out, and the exact wording. That history is uneditable from your side — it's an audit log, not a notepad.

When the moment comes to say “I demanded payment on these specific dates, including a formal Section-3 notice on the 18th of March, with these exact words” — you have it. Most sole traders don't. We've seen people lose claims for that reason alone.

Nothing.

Send invoices the way you always have. Honest Invoices stamps a due date on each one based on your payment terms. When something becomes overdue, our system runs every morning and drafts whatever's appropriate. You get an email saying “Action needed: chase draft ready for invoice INV-0042” with the full draft inside. Tap the link, review, send. About 30 seconds per invoice.

If you want to skip a chase, just don't approve it. Nothing fires until you do.

This isn't a separate product, a paid add-on, or a feature flag we're ramping. It's part of Honest Invoices. £15 a month, locked — the same price you started on, the same price you'll pay in three years. The AI cost is on us.

We built this because the founder kept hearing the same story from tradespeople: I do the work, I send the invoice, I wait two months, I forget to chase, by the time I get round to it I feel rude bringing it up. That's the conversation we wanted to take off your hands. Not the work. The awkward bit afterwards.

Get paid faster. With the law on your side. Without the bit you hate doing.