How to Get Paid Faster as a Contractor: I Found $19,887 Earned or Quoted and Never Collected in My Own Books

The $19,887 audit: an invoice nobody chased, a deposit I never billed, and checks in the wrong account

In September 2026 I ran every transaction my remodeling company, Revisions Unlimited, had touched in 18 months, about 1,200 lines across the business checking, the business card and my personal account, then laid my open invoices and quotes next to it. I built the bookkeeping app that did the work (Fischer Books, a local desktop app for my own three sets of books), so there was nowhere for the numbers to hide.

What came back was $19,887.76 of money I had already earned or already quoted and had not collected:

• $5,770.26 on an August invoice sent to a farm client and never mentioned again. No reminder, no call. It has since been paid, which tells you the customer was never the problem.
• $6,332.50 of deposit that was never billed. Half of a $12,665 concrete pad job in Milaca where I agreed terms, scheduled the work and never sent the deposit request. Nobody can pay an invoice that does not exist.
• Roughly $7.8K across three quotes I never followed up on, a different problem with its own fix: the five-touch estimate follow-up sequence I now run. This post stays on invoices, deposits and checks.

The audit also turned up job checks that had been deposited to the wrong account, which made the business books look starved for cash that had actually arrived. A simple rule fixed it: every job payment lands in the business account first, and an alert fires when money shows up anywhere else.

My receivables dashboard was six weeks stale when I opened it. September was my worst month on record, $134.40 of operating income, while $12,102.76 of billed-or-billable money waited for someone to ask for it.

Why 'send it sooner' is only half the answer

Every article on this says the same three things: invoice fast, take cards, send reminders. All true, and none of it would have caught what I found, because my money was leaking through three holes and 'send it sooner' plugs one.

• Never billed. The pad deposit was not late. It did not exist. No reminder tool chases an invoice you never created. The fix is upstream, at quote time.
• Billed and forgotten. The $5,770 invoice went out on time. Then nothing fired on day 30, 45 or 60. The fix is a sequence that runs without me.
• Paid but invisible. The wrong-account checks were collected. They never matched against an invoice, so the books said unpaid and my gut said fine. The fix is an alert that watches every account.

My cash flow makes this worse than for a steadier shop. Four months carried 76% of my 18-month revenue, and my median month was about $2,882 against roughly $3,425 of fixed overhead. In that business, a $6,000 deposit unbilled for two months is the difference between paying the crew from revenue and paying them off the card.

One fix per hole.

Deposits at quote time: a Stripe link beats 'I'll mail a check'

The biggest change was moving the deposit request into the quote itself. When a customer accepts now, the acceptance message carries a Stripe checkout link for the deposit. They pay by card or ACH from their phone in about a minute, and I get a push on mine when it clears.

Before, 'I'll get you a check when you start' was the default, which put the first dollar of every job on my memory.

• 50% deposit on materials-heavy work (concrete, decks, framing packages), 30% on labor-heavy work. The schedule date is the lever: nobody gets a date until the deposit lands.
• ACH as the first button, card as the backup. Stripe's published US pricing is 0.8% capped at $5 for ACH and 2.9% plus 30 cents for cards (stripe.com/pricing). On a $6,332.50 deposit that is $5 versus about $184, and most customers pick the transfer once it is the first option.
• The link is the deposit invoice. It carries the job name, amount and terms, so there is no second document to forget. The same pattern I use for storefronts on Stripe works as a pay button under the quote on a contractor website. It is a small addition to the site you already have, not a new platform.
• Style Marking has no invoices to chase at all, because every project is paid through Stripe checkout before the work is scheduled. That is the extreme version, and the right one for set-price work.

The reminder cadence, the exact texts, and when a reminder must not fire

Reminders go out as a text first and an email second, because my customers read texts and ignore email. Every reminder carries the pay link, so it is one tap from paid. The sequence counts calendar days from the due date and stops the moment money matches.

1. Three days before due. "Hi [Name], Jacob with Revisions Unlimited. Quick heads-up that the invoice for [job] ($[amount]) is due [date]. You can pay here: [link]. Thanks again for the work."
2. Due day. "Hi [Name], the [job] invoice ($[amount]) is due today. Pay link: [link]. Shout if anything on it looks off."
3. Three days past due. "Hi [Name], checking in on the [job] invoice, now 3 days past due. Here's the link again: [link]. If a check is already in the mail, reply 'mailed' and I'll stop these."
4. Seven days past due. "Hi [Name], the [job] invoice ($[amount]) is a week past due and I'd like to close it out this week. Pay here: [link], or call me at [phone] if something is holding it up."
5. Fourteen days past due. "[Name], the [job] invoice is now 14 days past due. Per our agreement, [late fee or interest clause] applies from [date]. Please pay by [date + 7] here: [link]. If I don't hear from you I'll follow up by phone and in writing." For a GC, this one cites the statute instead, covered below.

Polite for three touches, firm on the fourth, specific on the fifth. Then it hands off to me for a phone call and, when warranted, a written demand. The automation never threatens a lien; that is a human decision.

Stop rules: when a reminder must not fire

The stop rules took longer to write than the texts, and they keep you from looking like a robot or a bully.

• Money landed, in any account. Paid is paid, even in the wrong account. Rule one, because it was my failure.
• The customer replied. Any reply, including a disputed line item, pauses the sequence and pings me. 'Mailed,' 'call me' and 'what is this for' all mean a human takes over until it is settled.
• Partial payment. The sequence restarts from touch one on the balance instead of firing touch four at someone who just paid most of it.
• Hours and consent. Nothing goes out before 8 a.m. or after 8 p.m., never on a Sunday, and only to a number the customer gave me for this job.
• A hardship flag. One tap pauses everything 30 days when a customer is in the hospital or just lost a spouse. I would rather make that call than have a text land at a funeral.

Alerts when money lands, or lands in the wrong account

The audit also turned up job checks that had been deposited to the wrong account, which made the business books look starved for cash that had actually arrived. A simple rule fixed it: every job payment lands in the business account first, and an alert fires when money shows up anywhere else.

• Clean match in the business account. The invoice flips to paid, the reminders stop, and I get a quiet 'paid: [job] $[amount]' push on my phone.
• Match in the wrong account. Same flip to paid, but the alert is loud: 'WRONG ACCOUNT: $20,000 deposit matches [job], move it,' plus a transfer reminder so the business account actually gets its money.
• Money with no match. A deposit I cannot tie to an invoice becomes a card in the app asking what it is. Half the time it is a job I never invoiced.

Plus two scheduled nudges: a Monday receivables digest (open, past due, what fired last week) and one line when an invoice passes 30 days with no touch. The digest fixed the stale dashboard; I do not have to remember to look.

I built this into my own bookkeeping app, but you do not need one to start. A bank feed, a spreadsheet of open invoices and one script comparing them will catch a wrong-account deposit by Friday. The books and tax tooling I write about here started that small.

Minnesota notes: who owes you changes the rules (not legal advice)

I am a contractor, not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. It comes from building subcontractor compliance paperwork for framing and GC companies I work with, and from reading the statutes. Have your attorney read it once before you lean on it.

The first question is not how late it is but who owes you, because Minnesota treats the two answers very differently.

If a GC or prime contractor owes you

• Minnesota's prompt-payment law, Minn. Stat. § 337.10 subd. 3, reads a requirement into every building and construction contract: the prime contractor and every subcontractor must pay their subs and suppliers within ten days of receiving payment for that undisputed work.
• Miss the window and the contract is deemed to require interest of 1.5% per month on the undisputed unpaid amount.
• The same subdivision lets a contractor or sub of any tier that has not received an undisputed payment within those ten days suspend work until it is paid. Put it in writing before you use it.
• The trigger is the GC getting paid, not your invoice date, so ask in writing when the owner paid. My touch-five text to a GC cites the ten-day clock and the 1.5% rate.

If a homeowner owes you

• When a homeowner hires you directly, § 337.10 does not apply; your late fee or interest is whatever your signed agreement says, and nothing more.
• If the contract is silent, the default legal rate under Minn. Stat. § 334.01 is 6% per year, and a written rate is capped at 8% with limited exceptions. That is a fraction of what a GC owes, which is why the clause has to be in your contract before the job starts.
• Put the clause in your contract this week: one sentence naming the due date, the rate and the day it starts. My touch-five text quotes it back to the customer, and it cannot quote a sentence that does not exist.

The lien ladder, in plain terms

A mechanic's lien is the last rung, and the dates are unforgiving. If you hire subs or suppliers on a residential job, the pre-lien notice has to be in your written contract with the owner (§ 514.011) or you lose the lien. The lien statement must be recorded and served on the owner within 120 days of your last day of labor or materials (§ 514.08). My app counts those 120 days from the last logged work date on every job, so the decision is never made on day 118. Whether to file is a lawyer conversation; knowing the date is not.

The cost-of-waiting math, and what to hand your bookkeeper or developer

The arithmetic I use to decide how hard to push: amount owed, times the annual rate you pay to float it (or the return you are missing), times days outstanding over 365.

• The $6,332.50 pad deposit sat unbilled about 60 days. Floating that on my business card at roughly 25% APR cost about $260 in interest on money that was already mine.
• The $5,770.26 invoice went roughly 75 days from invoice to paid: about $296 at the same rate. Had the payer been a GC under § 337.10, the statute would have put 1.5% a month, about $87, on their side of the table instead of mine.

The calculator above runs the other half: what your time chasing money costs you a year. For my shop, three hours a week at an $85 crew-lead rate comes to about $12,750 a year, before counting the $12,000 the audit found sitting uncollected.

The one-page spec

Whether you hand this to a bookkeeper, a developer, or me, it is the same six items:

1. Invoice states: draft, sent, partially paid, paid, disputed, paused, timestamped on every change.
2. Deposit at acceptance: a pay link created when the quote is accepted, with the schedule date gated on it.
3. The cadence: -3, 0, +3, +7, +14 days from due date, text then email, with the five templates above and a 'who owes you' field that swaps the homeowner clause for the GC statute on touch five.
4. Stop rules: paid anywhere, replied, disputed, partial, hours and consent, hardship, written down before the first reminder sends.
5. Payment matching across every account you control, with a loud alert for wrong-account deposits and a card for unmatched money.
6. Two scheduled nudges: a Monday receivables digest and a 30-days-no-touch flag, plus a lien-date counter in Minnesota.

That is the whole system: what I used to hold in my head, written down so my head is free for the work that pays. To scope it for your shop, start with what to automate first, then tell me how you invoice today and I will come back with a set build price and a monthly plan for just the services you need.

Frequently asked questions

Related reading