Nobody has decided not to pay you.
That is worth saying first, because the two weeks after an invoice goes past due are spent constructing a story in which somebody has, and that story makes every message you send worse. It makes them longer, more apologetic, or more aggressive, and all three delay the payment further.
Almost every late invoice in this country is late for a structural reason, and the useful message is not a demand. It is the one that removes the specific obstacle in front of the specific person holding it.
Why it stalls, by who you are chasing
Belgium gives you three common buyers, and they fail to pay for completely different reasons. Guessing which one you are dealing with is most of the work.
The marketing manager
Here the invoice is inside a process, and processes have dates that nobody told you about.
It may be waiting for a purchase order number that was never created, sitting in an approval queue behind somebody on holiday, or waiting for the next payment run, which happens on fixed days of the month rather than when your invoice arrives. None of this is visible from outside, and the person you are talking to often does not know either, because payment is not their department.
The mistake creators make is escalating emotionally with this buyer. They are not the obstacle, and treating them as one costs you a client who was never withholding anything. What works is asking a procedural question, because a procedural question can be forwarded to the person who actually knows.
The owner
The opposite situation entirely. There is no process, no queue and no payment run.
Your invoice is in an inbox with four hundred others, and the person who has to act on it is also doing sales, hiring and whatever went wrong this morning. It is not in a system, it is in their head, and it has fallen out.
Escalation is equally wrong here, for the opposite reason: there is nobody to escalate to. What works is being easy. One short message, the amount, the reference, and a way to pay in one action rather than three. An owner will very often pay the moment paying takes less effort than remembering to pay later.
The agency chain
The third case is the one that surprises people, and Belgium has a lot of it.
An agency invoicing you is frequently waiting to be paid by their own client before they pay you, whatever the contract says. That is not an excuse and it is a fact about the money, and it means the delay you are experiencing has a cause two steps away from anybody you can email.
The useful thing to know is that this is predictable. If you work with agencies, the delay is a feature of the arrangement and belongs in your pricing and your cash planning rather than in your feelings each month.
| Who you invoiced | Why it is late | The message that unblocks it |
|---|---|---|
| A marketing manager | It is stuck in a process step | Ask which reference the invoice needs |
| A marketing manager, again | The payment run has fixed dates | Ask which date the next run falls on |
| An owner | It has fallen out of their head | Short reminder plus a one click payment link |
| An agency | They have not been paid yet | Ask for their client's payment date |
| Anybody, after a long silence | Something has changed there | Ask a yes or no question, once |
The last row is the discipline that matters. After several unanswered messages, stop writing paragraphs and send something that can be answered with one word, because a long message from a creditor is easy to postpone and a short question is not.
What to put in place before the work
Everything above is much easier if two things were agreed before you filmed, and both take one sentence.
The two lines that do the work
The first is the payment date, stated as a date rather than as a number of days. Thirty days is an abstraction that begins whenever somebody decides it began. The fifteenth of next month is a thing that arrives.
The second is the name of the person who processes invoices, asked casually at the start rather than urgently at the end. In a company with a process, that single name removes most of the delay you would otherwise experience, and asking for it while everyone is enthusiastic costs nothing. Asking for it in week six sounds like an accusation.
Add your invoice details to the same message. A creator who supplies the reference, the company details and the bank information in one place, at the beginning, is dramatically easier to pay than one who supplies them piecemeal after the deadline.
When it has gone genuinely wrong
Sometimes it is not structural. There is a small number of clients who will not pay, and the signals are consistent: repeated promises with new dates, a change of contact person without handover, or a company that stops responding entirely.
At that point stop improvising. Belgium and the European Union have rules on late payment between businesses, including interest and compensation, and there is a formal reminder process before anything reaches a court. All of that changes and none of it belongs in a blog post as numbers. What belongs here is the instruction to look it up rather than to keep sending polite emails: the guichet d'entreprises can point you to the current position, and for anything substantial a lawyer's first letter is cheaper than you expect and works more often than it does not.
Two practical notes. Keep everything in writing from the start, because a chain of messages is what makes a formal step easy later. And decide a threshold in advance, in money and in months, at which you escalate rather than deciding it while angry.
The part nobody says out loud
In a market this size, how you chase matters as much as whether you chase.
The same marketing managers move between the same companies, and the person you deal with harshly at a small brand may be running the account you want at a larger one next year. That is not a reason to be soft, it is a reason to be procedural: firm, short, specific, and never personal. Firmness costs you nothing here. Anger costs you the next three years of that person's memory.
Keep reading
- "You Said You Were Bilingual"
- The Sale You Lost Is Not in Your Analytics
- The Owner Wants to Be in the Video
- Going Full Time as a UGC Creator in Belgium
- The complete UGC guide for Belgium
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Frequently asked questions
How long should I wait before the first reminder?
Send it the day after the agreed date, not a week later. It is a neutral administrative act at that point, and it becomes an awkward one the longer you leave it.
Should I charge interest on late payment?
You are generally entitled to something under the rules covering business to business payment, and most creators never claim it. Check the current position rather than assuming, and be aware that mentioning it early changes the tone of the relationship, which may or may not be what you want.
What if the brand says the file was not usable?
That is a different conversation from payment and it should have happened at delivery. Ask what specifically fails against the brief, offer one fix, and put a date on it. Quality disputes raised only after an invoice is due are usually about the invoice.
Can I stop work on a second job for the same client?
Yes, and saying so calmly in advance is more effective than doing it silently. I am holding the next delivery until the first invoice is settled is a normal sentence in business, and it is far better received than an unexplained delay.