How to Invoice a US Company and What to Do When They Do Not Pay

Send it to accounts payable, not to your manager, with a specific due date rather than the words Net 30, and state who pays the transfer fees. Those three things prevent most of what goes wrong.

The first invoice is where a lot of new contractors quietly lose a month.

They send a well written note to the person they work with, listing what they did and what they are owed. It reads like a message between colleagues, which is exactly the problem. It goes nowhere, because the person receiving it was never the one who pays.

Your invoice is a database entry, not a letter

In any company past a certain size, invoices land in accounts payable. That is a separate function from the team you work with, running on its own schedule, and it processes documents rather than conversations.

Accounts payable is looking for particular fields. A vendor record that matches you. An invoice number that has not been used before. A purchase order or project reference if the company uses them. An amount, a date, and instructions for paying it.

If a field is missing, the document does not get rejected with an explanation. It sits. Your contact assumes finance has it. Finance is waiting for something. Nobody is being difficult and you are still not paid.

So write for the system rather than for your colleague. Ask during onboarding where invoices should be sent and what they need on them. That single question is worth more than any template.

What goes on it

Your full legal name and address, matching whatever they hold on file for you. If the name on the invoice does not match the name on the contract, expect a delay.

A unique invoice number, in a sequence you keep. Not "invoice" three times in a row.

The invoice date, and a specific due date written as an actual date. "Due 27 February" is enforceable in a way "Net 30" is not, because Net 30 requires the reader to know when the clock started. Write both if you like, but write the date.

What the work was, in language a finance clerk who has never met you can match against a budget line. Vague descriptions get queried, and a query is another week.

Their reference numbers if they gave you any. Purchase order, vendor ID, project code.

The amount, the currency stated explicitly, and payment instructions in their own clearly marked section.

The cross-border part nobody warns you about

Two things go wrong specifically because you are not in the United States, and both cost money quietly.

ACH will not reach you. It is the cheap domestic rail US companies default to, and it does not cross borders. If a finance team asks for your routing and account number expecting to run ACH, that conversation needs to happen before the due date, not after a failed payment. Tell them at onboarding which method you can actually receive.

Intermediary banks take a cut of your money, not theirs. An international wire can pass through one or two correspondent banks, each deducting a fee in transit. Nobody announces this. You invoice for 2,000 and 1,950 arrives, and the client's records honestly show they sent 2,000.

Decide who absorbs that and write it on the invoice. The phrase you want is that all transfer and intermediary charges are for the payer's account, agreed before the work rather than argued afterwards. If they will not agree, price it in instead. What you cannot do is discover it on payment one and absorb it every month for a year.

Ask early which method they use, and compare what actually lands rather than what is quoted. A slightly worse headline rate that arrives whole can beat a better one that gets shaved twice.

Send it to the right place

Send it to accounts payable, and copy your contact. Not the other way around.

Your contact's job is to approve, not to pay. Copying them means they can nudge if it stalls. Sending only to them means the document is sitting in an inbox belonging to someone with no ability to release money.

Terms, and the clause people learn about too late

Net 30 is the common standard and it is not an insult. Net 15 is achievable if you ask before the work starts, and much harder afterwards.

The important part is the late fee, and the rule that catches people is this. You cannot apply a late fee that was never agreed. A charge invented at the moment you are annoyed has no standing. It has to live in the contract, before the work, and be restated on each invoice for it to mean anything.

Somewhere around one and a half per cent per month on the outstanding balance is a normal commercial figure. Its purpose is not the income. It is to give your invoice a reason to move up a queue where everyone else's is sitting flat.

Agreeing a deposit for larger pieces of work belongs in the same conversation, and the same rule applies. Ask before, not during.

When payment does not arrive

Assume administration before assuming bad faith. Most late payments are a missing field, an approver on leave, or a run that happens on the fifteenth.

Day one after due. A short, factual note to accounts payable, your contact copied, invoice attached again. No apology and no accusation. You are prompting a system.

Day seven. Ask a specific question rather than repeating yourself. Has it been approved. Is it scheduled for a payment run. Which one. Specific questions get specific answers and are hard to leave unanswered.

Day fourteen. Raise it with your contact directly as a working matter, not a complaint. They usually have more internal reach than you do and would rather solve it than lose you.

Beyond that. Stop new work, and say plainly that you are pausing until the outstanding invoice clears. Continuing to deliver while unpaid teaches the arrangement that payment is optional. This is the point where the late fee you agreed at the start earns its place.

Keep everything in writing throughout. Not to build a case, but because a clear record is what makes the conversation short.

The realistic view on recourse

Chasing a foreign company through courts over a normal invoice is rarely worth what it costs. The protection is not the remedy, it is the setup.

That means the terms agreed before you start, invoices that cannot be delayed on a technicality, work delivered in stages for anything large, and not letting an unpaid balance grow while you keep working. Most contractors who get badly burned had all the warning signs by invoice two and kept going anyway.

Get the first invoice right and most of this never comes up. That is genuinely how it usually goes.

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