What actually goes on a trade invoice, from someone who wrote them late and chased them

The query that costs you a week

An invoice comes back with a question. The kitchen can't match a line to a delivery, or there's no reference for their system to file it against, or the price on the page isn't the price you agreed on the phone. None of it is a dispute. It's just a query, and a query means the invoice goes back on your desk instead of into their pay run.

That's the part people miss. The money doesn't stop because the invoice was wrong. It stops because someone has to ask you a question, wait for the answer, and then start again from the top of their process. A query that takes you two minutes to answer can still push payment out by a week, because the buyer's week has already moved on without you in it.

I wrote invoices late, sent them late, and chased them from people I needed to keep as customers. Before that I spent about a decade as a chef, on the receiving end of other people's invoices. So this is the list from both sides of the delivery: what has to be on the page so nobody has to ring you.

What a kitchen actually checks

A buyer doesn't read your invoice. They check it against something. Usually that's the delivery note, the order they placed, and their memory of what the two of you agreed. The invoice's job is to line up with all three without anyone having to think hard.

So the line items have to say three things clearly.

What was delivered. Not "greens" or "assorted", but the actual thing, named the way the buyer knows it. If they ordered by a name and you invoice by a different one, that's a query.

When it was delivered. A date the kitchen can match to a delivery they actually took in. If your invoice date and your delivery date are the same thing and neither matches when the box arrived, someone has to work out why.

At what price. The price you agreed, per unit, with the quantity shown, so the maths is visible. A single lump sum with no breakdown is the fastest way to get an invoice set aside "to check later", and later is where invoices go to die.

A vague line doesn't get waved through on trust. It gets parked. From the kitchen side I can tell you nobody in a busy service is going to give a supplier the benefit of the doubt on a number they can't see. They'll finish the shift, mean to come back to it, and it sits.

The fields that get you paid on time

Beyond the lines themselves, a handful of things decide whether the invoice moves or stalls.

A clear issue date. This is the clock everyone's terms run from, so it has to be unambiguous and it has to be real.

Payment terms, stated plainly on the page. Net 7, net 15, on delivery, whatever you actually run. Don't assume the buyer knows your terms or will use their own. Write them where they can be read. An invoice with no terms is an invoice with no due date, and one with no due date has no reason to be paid this week rather than next month.

A reference the buyer can file against. Many trade buyers work to a purchase order number or an account reference, and if theirs isn't on your invoice, their system has nowhere to put it. If they gave you a PO, it goes on the invoice. If they didn't, give the invoice your own clear number so that when you do have to ring, you're both looking at the same piece of paper.

Your payment details, where they can find them without asking. Account details, or however you take payment, on the invoice itself. Making a buyer dig out an old email for your bank details is a small friction, and small friction is exactly what moves you down the pile.

None of this is clever. It only has to be complete. An invoice with every field filled in gets paid on the buyer's normal schedule. An incomplete one gets paid when they get round to chasing the missing bit, which is slower and puts the work on them.

Why "sent late" is its own problem

You can get every field right and still hurt yourself by sending it a fortnight after the delivery.

Time works against verification. The day the box arrives, the delivery is fresh in the kitchen's mind and easy to confirm. Two weeks on, the person who took it in has done forty more deliveries, and now your invoice is a small research project for them. The longer the gap between delivering and invoicing, the more likely a clean invoice still generates a query, because they can no longer just remember.

Late invoices also slip down the buyer's own pile. Send it with the delivery, or the same day, and it lands while you're a live part of their week. Send it three weeks later and it arrives cold, competing with everything more recent.

This was my own worst habit. Invoicing was the job that slipped: written late, sent late, and sometimes forgotten entirely. Then I'd be chasing money from people I wanted to keep buying from me, which is about the least comfortable conversation there is. The invoice being correct didn't save me. The delay did the damage on its own.

Both sides of the delivery

Here's why the timing slips, because it's worth being honest about. You invoice at the end of a week that has already taken everything you had. The growing or the baking or the cooking is the part you're good at and the part you care about, and the admin is what's left when you're spent. So it waits. It waits until Sunday, then until you've got a clear hour, and some of it never gets written at all.

I know that from the producing side. I also know the other side, because I spent about a decade in kitchens receiving from producers.

From a kitchen, sloppy supplier admin reads as a signal. An invoice that's late, or wrong, or impossible to match makes a buyer wonder what else is loose. It doesn't usually cause a row. It quietly lowers their confidence in you, and a buyer with lower confidence is slower to pay, quicker to query, and easier to lose when someone tidier turns up. The invoice is often the only bit of your operation the buyer sees in writing. It's doing more work on their impression of you than you'd like it to.

That cuts both ways, which is the useful part. A clean, prompt, complete invoice is a small ongoing signal that you have your act together as a supplier. Reputation rarely comes cheaper than that.

A checklist to hold your next invoice against

Pull up the last invoice you sent and check it for:

• Each line naming what was delivered, in words the buyer uses.
• The delivery date the kitchen can match to a box they took in.
• Quantity and agreed unit price shown, so the total is visible, not just a lump sum.
• A clear issue date.
• Payment terms written plainly on the page.
• The buyer's PO or account reference, or your own clear invoice number if there isn't one.
• Your payment details, on the invoice, not in a separate email.
• Sent with the delivery or the same day, not a fortnight later.

Most invoices that trigger a follow-up call are missing two or three of these, not ten. Find your two or three.

Where a tool helps, and where paper is fine

You can do every bit of this on paper or in a spreadsheet, and plenty of good suppliers do. The checklist is the point, not the software.

What a tool saves you is the retyping and the forgetting. If your orders and your customers already live in one place, an invoice can be built from the line items you actually delivered instead of reconstructed from memory on a Sunday night. That's the part makeweek does: your contacts, your orders, the line items and prices, turned into an invoice and marked off when it's paid, so the record of who owes you what isn't sitting in your head. It won't chase anyone for you and it isn't an accounting system. It just makes the invoice quicker to get right and harder to forget, which, going by my own late ones, is most of the battle.