How fast you actually get paid, the real timeline

Where the time actually goes

An invoice’s life has four stages, and they are very different lengths.

Most marketing about invoicing speed is about the third row. It is the shortest one.

The row that decides your month is the first. An invoice sent the day the work is done and an invoice sent three weeks later arrive in different payment runs, and no amount of platform speed recovers those three weeks.

What we control, and what it is worth

Payouts go out the same day, in hourly runs between 09:00 and 17:00 Finnish time, as SEPA Instant transfers. In practice that means the money moves within about an hour of your client’s payment landing, inside those hours.

Compare that with “up to two banking days,” which is what the largest service in the Finnish market states. Over a month with several invoices that is a real difference in when you can pay your own bills, but it is still the third row, and it is worth being honest about which row it is.

Getting paid before the client pays

Express pay advances the money before the client’s payment arrives. It costs 20,00 euros plus 5 per cent of the invoice.

Example. On a 2 000 € invoice that is 20 € plus 100 €, so 120 € to receive the money perhaps three weeks earlier.

Whether that is sensible depends entirely on what the alternative is. Against an overdraft fee or a missed rent payment it is cheap. As a habit on every invoice it is expensive, and the money is better spent on getting the first row right.

The three things that actually shorten the wait

Invoice the day the work is done. The single largest lever, and the one that costs nothing. Large organisations run payments on a cycle; missing this week’s cycle costs you a week or two, not a day.

Agree the payment term in writing before you start. Net 14 and net 30 are a fortnight apart and they are negotiable at the start of a job and not at the end of one.

Send it to the right place. Accounts payable, not the person who hired you, and into the supplier portal if the client uses one. An invoice sitting in a project manager’s inbox is not late, it is lost.

What happens if the client does not pay

You do not chase it. Payment monitoring runs automatically, and a reminder goes out in the service’s name rather than yours seven days after the due date, followed by one payment demand. Collection proper we start at your request; under clause 11 of the terms it is an additional service outside the base price.

Penalty interest accrues from the day after the due date whether or not anyone mentions it, and on a business debt there is a 40 euro standard compensation you are entitled to claim. What that is worth and how the process runs is in the guide to debt collection, and the step-by-step version is here.

What this costs

The service fee is 1,90 to 3,90 per cent by package, with a minimum of 9,90 to 14,90 euros per invoice and a cap of 249 euros: the price list has the detail, and the calculator does your own numbers.

Express pay and same-day payout are described on same day payment and express payment.