The invoice is ninety days late. Lien, small claims, or write it off

The job finished in March. The invoice went out the same week, the client acknowledged it in April, and it is now the second week of June with nothing received and calls going unreturned.

This is an ordinary situation and it has an ordinary sequence, and the reason it so often ends badly is that the sequence has deadlines that started running before anyone was worried.

Week one: the part that recovers most invoices

Before anything adversarial, three steps recover a large share of late payments, because a large share of late payments are administrative rather than deliberate.

1. Confirm the invoice arrived at the right place. Wrong email, wrong entity name, missing purchase order number, or a portal nobody mentioned. This accounts for more slow payment than bad faith does.
2. Ask for a payment date rather than for payment. A specific question produces a specific answer, and the answer either resolves it or tells you something useful.
3. Put the request in writing with the original invoice attached, stating the amount, the date it was due, and the terms it was issued on. This is the document every later step builds from.

What decides how the next stage goes is what the contract said. Terms specifying a due date, a late charge, and who pays collection costs give you something to point at. Without them the conversation is about fairness, which nobody agrees on.

The lien clock, which is the urgent one

Anyone who supplied labor or materials to improve real property may have a mechanics lien right, and it is by a wide margin the most powerful tool available to a contractor or supplier. It attaches to the property rather than chasing the owner, which means it must be resolved before the property can be sold or refinanced.

It is also the most deadline-driven remedy in this area. The requirements vary by state and typically include some combination of a preliminary notice given early in the job, a recording deadline measured from completion or last work, and a separate deadline to enforce the lien by filing suit. Miss any one and the right is gone.

Two consequences follow. Learn your state's sequence before you need it, not during a dispute. And send the preliminary notice on every job as a matter of routine, if your state uses one, because it is not an accusation and it preserves an option you may never use.

Small claims, and what it is good for

For amounts within the limit, which varies by state, small claims court is fast, inexpensive, and usually does not require an attorney. Filing fees are modest and cases are heard within months rather than years.

It works best on clean facts: a signed contract or accepted proposal, evidence the work was done, an invoice, and a record of requests for payment.

It works badly where the defense is that the work was defective, because the court then has to weigh a quality dispute, and quality disputes turn on expert evidence that small claims procedure is not built for.

The real question is collection. A judgment is not money. It is permission to pursue money, through garnishment or liens on assets, and each of those is a further step. Against a solvent local business with a bank account, that path works. Against an entity that has stopped operating, it frequently does not.

Comparing the three routes

When writing it off is the correct decision

It is a real option and it is under-used, because it feels like losing. The arithmetic is straightforward: the amount at stake, against the hours you will spend, valued at what you charge, plus the fees, multiplied by the probability of actually collecting.

For a small invoice against a debtor who is hard to reach, that calculation frequently favors writing it off and spending the same hours on billable work. The bad debt is deductible against income, which recovers a portion of it, and the emotional cost of a six-month pursuit is real even though it does not appear anywhere in the numbers.

What should not be written off is the lesson. Every uncollected invoice is a description of a gap in how the work was sold.

The terms that prevent the next one

Four changes, each of which costs nothing and each of which shifts the odds substantially.

A deposit, taken before mobilization, sized so that walking away from a non-payer is survivable. Progress payments tied to defined milestones rather than to a calendar, so that no single unpaid amount can grow large.

Stated terms on the face of every invoice: due date, late charge, and who bears collection costs. And a written change order process, because a large share of payment disputes are not refusals to pay at all, but arguments about work nobody agreed to in writing.

Contractors who adopt those four tend to report that the collection problem largely disappears, not because clients changed but because the exposure at any moment became small. That is the durable fix. The lien and the courthouse are what you use when the fix was not in place.