Invoicing and getting paid on time as a web designer

Invoicing and getting paid on time as a web designer is less about the invoice itself and more about three or four decisions made before it was ever sent: whether a deposit was taken, whether payment was tied to a specific milestone, and whether the terms were agreed in writing before any work started, rather than assumed by both sides. By the time an invoice is thirty days overdue, most of the leverage you had to prevent that has already gone. The fix sits earlier in the process than most freelancers look for it.

Ask for a deposit before you open a design file

A deposit does two jobs at once. It covers you if a client disappears in week two, and it filters out the enquiries that were never going to become paying work in the first place. A client unwilling to pay anything upfront for a project they have already agreed to is telling you something about how the rest of the relationship will go. There is no single correct percentage, but a third to half of the total fee upfront, with the balance split across the remaining milestones, is common and easy to justify: you are asking for a share of the money in exchange for blocking out your time, not asking them to fund the whole project before they have seen anything.

Tie invoices to milestones, not to the finish line

A single invoice at the end of a project concentrates all the risk into one moment, usually the moment the client has already got everything they wanted. Splitting the fee across two or three milestones, deposit on signing, a payment at design approval, the balance on completion, means nonpayment shows up early, while there is still less work at stake and still leverage left to do something about it. It also matches cash coming in to work going out, which matters more the longer a project runs. None of this needs to be complicated. It needs to be written down in the proposal before the client signs, not negotiated after the first milestone is already overdue.

What UK law actually gives you when someone pays late

For business-to-business invoices, the Late Payment of Commercial Debts legislation gives a supplier the right to charge statutory interest on an overdue invoice, calculated as a fixed percentage above the Bank of England base rate, plus a fixed compensation fee that scales with the size of the debt. In practice, most freelancers never actually invoke it, because a client who pays before things get that far never needs to hear about it, and one who has gone genuinely quiet is unlikely to be moved by a clause. Where it does earn its place is in the invoice itself: stating plainly that late payment may incur statutory interest signals that you know your rights and expect to be paid on the terms you set, which is a different message to send than an invoice with no terms mentioned at all.

Chase early, chase in writing, and stay specific

The most effective chase happens before the due date, not after it. A short note a few days ahead, confirming the invoice is on its way or has landed and restating the due date, catches problems while they are still easy to fix: an invoice sent to the wrong inbox, a purchase order number missing, an approver on holiday. Once a payment is actually late, keep the message short, specific and in writing rather than a phone call that leaves no record. Ask a direct question with a date attached, such as whether payment can be confirmed by Friday, rather than a vague check-in that is easy to leave unanswered. A paper trail also matters if the invoice ever needs escalating past a polite reminder.

Hold something back until the invoice clears

The strongest leverage a web designer has is usually not legal, it is practical: the site is not live, the source files have not been handed over, or the domain and hosting are still registered in your name rather than the client's. Agreeing upfront that final handover, including going live, happens once the final invoice is paid is a normal, unremarkable term, and it is far easier to state during onboarding than to introduce after the work is finished and the client is already asking for the keys. It is not a threat. It is simply the order the two halves of the exchange happen in.

Know when to stop working

The costliest mistake is continuing to build for a client who has already fallen behind on an earlier milestone, on the assumption that finishing the project will somehow make payment more likely. It rarely does. Once an agreed payment date has passed without a response, pausing further work until it is resolved protects the hours you have not yet given away for free, in the same way that holding a firm line on scope protects the hours you have already priced. Neither is about being difficult with a client. Both are about making sure the project you deliver is the project you actually get paid for.

Patchscout does not touch invoicing, that part of the job stays with you, but getting paid on time starts further back than the invoice, in how a prospect is approached in the first place. An outreach email grounded in a real audit of a business's website tends to attract a more serious kind of client than a generic pitch, and a more serious client is the one who pays a deposit without an argument.

The three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup are enough to see whether Patchscout finds you that kind of prospect before you write the first invoice.