Chasing a large UK customer: who to email, and what to ask for

When a small business sells to a large company, the person who hired them is almost never the person who pays them. Your client sends the invoice to a contact. The contact says "I have approved it." Then the invoice disappears into a payables process nobody has explained, and sixty days later the owner is asking you why the money has not arrived.

This is how to chase in that situation, written for UK bookkeepers working on behalf of small clients. It is general guidance, not legal advice, and every large customer has its own system, so treat this as a list of questions to ask rather than a procedure.

Find out the process at the start

The best time to learn how a big customer pays is before the first invoice. Ask your client to get four things from their contact:

1. The name or shared mailbox of the accounts payable team. 2. Whether invoices must go through a supplier portal or can be emailed. 3. Whether a purchase order number is required, and in what format. 4. How often payment runs happen, and what the cut-off is.

Write the answers down. A payment run on the last Friday of the month with a cut-off a week earlier explains a lot of "late" invoices that were never late.

The portal trap

Some large customers only accept invoices uploaded to their own system. An invoice emailed to the person who hired you can sit forever because it never reached the process. If an invoice is overdue, the first thing to check is whether it is in the right place, and whether the portal shows it as received, approved or scheduled for payment.

Ask a specific question

"Has this been paid?" gets a vague answer. These get a real one:

• Has invoice [number] been received by accounts payable?
• Has it been approved, and when?
• Which payment run is it in?
• Is anything missing, such as a purchase order number?

Keep the message short and put the invoice number, amount and due date in the first line. Our reminder email examples show the tone.

Copy the right people, once

Your client's contact is useful for pushing things from the inside, but not for paperwork. Send the question to the payables team and copy the contact. In Mugavi you can add other people at a customer, such as an accounts payable address, so they also receive reminders and statements. Each gets their own email with their own unsubscribe link, up to five extra people per customer, and a reply from any of them pauses the reminder and lands in your Inbox. Reply matching for a copied person has not been tested against a real mailbox yet.

Use a statement when there are several

If a large customer has several open invoices, a statement is easier for a payables team than a string of reminders. See a statement instead of another reminder.

Know when to go over their head

If payables says it is approved and scheduled and the date passes, ask for the new date in writing. If a second date passes, it is time for the owner to speak to their contact by phone. Do not threaten. Large companies have processes, and your client usually wants to be a supplier again next year.

Keep a paper trail

Note the date you sent each message, who you sent it to and what they said. If the customer is in the UK and the invoice stays unpaid, you will want this record for any conversation about statutory interest. Look up the current rules on gov.uk before you rely on them.

Clear terms on the original invoice make this chase easier too. See UK invoice payment terms that make a late invoice easier to chase.

Where Mugavi fits

Mugavi is for small businesses and the bookkeepers who work with them. It drafts the reminder, you approve it, and it waits thirty seconds before sending so you can undo. It has no portal integrations, so it will not tell you whether a customer's portal has your invoice. We have not tested it with a UK QuickBooks company. The UK page has the details we are sure of.

Related reading: checking who you invoiced at a UK company before chasing.