Get paid before your client pays: what each option costs
Deposits, early-payment discounts, and invoice finance all shorten the wait. Only one of them is free, and one is far more expensive than it looks.
The Delivvo team· July 24, 2026 8 min read
Every invoice you send is a short-term loan you have made to a company that is almost certainly better capitalised than you are. You did the work, you carried the cost, and you are waiting to be repaid at zero percent.
The gap is measurable. Xero's Small Business Insights for the United States, published on 30 April 2026, found small businesses waited an average of 28.8 days to be paid in the March quarter, up from 28.3 days, and that invoices were paid 9.0 days late on average, up from 8.4 days. Payment times had been improving through much of 2025 and started slipping again.
There are four ways to shorten that wait. They differ in cost by an order of magnitude, and most freelancers reach for the expensive ones first.
Option one: take the money before the work
The cheapest financing is the deposit, because it costs nothing and it also filters clients.
A deposit is not just cash flow. It is the first test of whether a client's finance process can actually pay you, run at the point where walking away costs you nothing. Clients who cannot process a 30 percent deposit in two weeks will not process the final invoice in two weeks either. You have learned that for free.
For anything running longer than a month, milestones do the same job repeatedly. Bill on defined events rather than on completion, and the maximum you are ever exposed to is one milestone rather than the whole engagement. The mechanics are covered in the milestone payment schedule guide, and the awkward conversation part in how to collect a deposit before you start.
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Exhaust this option before considering any of the others. It is free, and everything below is not.
A laptop and notebook with payment charts on a wooden desk
Option two: the early payment discount, and the math nobody does
The classic offer is 2/10 net 30. Two percent off if the client pays within 10 days, otherwise the full amount at 30 days.
It feels generous and small. Run the arithmetic and it stops feeling small.
You are giving up 2 percent to be paid 20 days early. There are roughly 18.25 periods of 20 days in a year. Simple annualisation: 2 percent multiplied by 18.25 is about 36.5 percent a year. On a $10,000 invoice, the discount is $200 for 20 days of money.
That is not automatically a bad deal. If the alternative is a credit card at 24 percent or missing rent, 36.5 percent annualised for twenty days is fine. What is not fine is standing that offer on every invoice by default, because then you are paying 36 percent annualised on your entire revenue to solve a problem you may not have that month.
Two sane versions of the same idea. Offer the discount case by case, when you actually need the money. Or offer a smaller discount, 1 percent for payment within 7 days, which annualises around 16 percent and is closer to what money genuinely costs.
Option three: sell the invoice
Invoice finance means a third party advances you most or all of the invoice value now and collects from your client later.
Real published numbers, from providers' own pages in 2026. FundThrough lists 1.9 to 2.9 percent per 30 days for invoices up to $999,999, with a 100 percent advance rate, meaning it advances the full invoice minus the fee rather than holding back a reserve. altLINE, the factoring arm of a bank, describes rates typically ranging from 1 to 5 percent of invoice value with advance rates of 80 to 90 percent, rising with invoice volume and depending on how creditworthy your client is and how long the invoice stays unpaid. It also notes that some factors charge a monthly minimum volume fee if you do not factor a set amount.
Translate that into a single invoice. A $10,000 invoice at 2.5 percent for 30 days costs $250. Annualised, that is roughly 30 percent. In the same range as the discount, and often simpler, because you are not renegotiating terms with a client every time.
Three things to check before signing anything.
Recourse. If your client never pays, do you have to buy the invoice back? Usually yes. Non-recourse costs more and is narrower than it sounds.
Notification. Does your client find out? In traditional factoring they usually do, because they are told to pay the factor. Some clients read that as a distress signal.
Concentration. If one client is 70 percent of your revenue, factors will price that risk into your rate. That is a useful, unflattering piece of feedback about your business.
Option four: pick clients who pay, before you sign
The cheapest cash flow fix is not financial at all. It is refusing to take on a slow payer.
For UK clients this is public information and almost nobody uses it. Large businesses must report their payment practices, and anyone can search the results through the government's payment practices service. The duty applies to a company or LLP meeting at least two of: 54 million pounds turnover, 27 million pounds balance sheet total, 250 employees. They must publish at least twice a year, and the reports show the average time taken to pay suppliers and the proportion of payments not paid on time.
Ten minutes in that database before signing tells you whether your quoted 30-day terms are real. If a prospective client's own filing shows an average of 61 days, you now know to ask for a deposit and to price the wait, before the contract rather than after.
For EU work there is a statutory floor. The European Commission sets out that enterprises have to pay invoices within 60 days unless they expressly agree otherwise and that agreement is not grossly unfair, that public authorities pay within 30 days, and that late payment triggers automatic entitlement to interest of at least 8 percentage points above the European Central Bank reference rate plus a minimum of 40 euro in compensation for recovery costs.
Most freelancers never invoke that interest. Naming it in your terms is still useful, because it moves the default from "whenever" to "there is a defined consequence".
A worked example on a $12,000 project
Numbers make the ranking obvious. Take a three-month project worth $12,000, invoiced at the end, paid at the average: 29 days after invoicing, 9 of them late.
Do nothing. You finance $12,000 of work for three months, then wait another month. Cost in cash is zero and cost in risk is everything, because a client failure at month three costs you the entire fee.
Deposit plus milestones. 30 percent up front, then two milestone invoices. Your maximum exposure at any point drops to about $4,000, you are paid roughly six weeks earlier on average, and the cost is one slightly uncomfortable conversation at the start. Cash cost: nothing.
Early payment discount at 2/10 net 30 on the final $8,400. You receive $8,232 twenty days sooner and give up $168. Annualised, you paid about 36 percent for that money.
Invoice finance on the final $8,400 at 2.5 percent for 30 days. You receive roughly $8,190 now and the funder collects later. You paid about $210, near 30 percent annualised, and depending on the arrangement your client is told to pay someone else.
Same project, four outcomes. The free option is also the one that reduces risk the most, and it is the only one that requires no counterparty to agree to anything after the work has already been done.
Terms that quietly cost you money
Before paying anyone for speed, check whether the delay was designed into your own paperwork.
Net 60 accepted without a word. Doubling the wait is a price change. If a client insists on it, that is fine, and it belongs in the rate.
Invoicing at month end instead of on completion. Finish on the 2nd, invoice on the 30th, and you have donated four weeks. Invoice on the day the milestone is accepted.
Missing purchase order numbers. In larger companies, an invoice without a PO is not late, it is invisible. Ask which reference the invoice needs before you send the first one.
Supplier portals nobody told you about. Some enterprises only pay through their own portal. Register during onboarding, not after your first invoice has aged 45 days in a procurement queue.
No named payment contact. Chasing "accounts@" is chasing nobody. Get a human name at kickoff, while everyone still likes you.
Fix those five and the average freelancer recovers more days than any financing product would buy, at a cost of about an hour.
Delivvo gives freelancers one branded portal for deposits, milestone invoices, and payment links, with payments running through the freelancer's own gateway and no platform cut, so the fastest option, getting paid on time in the first place, is the easiest one to set up. See how it works
The order to work through
Take a deposit. Bill milestones. Send the invoice the day the milestone is met rather than at month end. Follow up on day one after the due date rather than day fourteen, and if the follow-up is the part you dread, the late-paying client playbook has the language.
Only then consider paying for speed. When you do, price it honestly: an early-payment discount at 2/10 net 30 costs about 36 percent a year, and invoice finance at 2 to 3 percent per 30 days costs about the same. Both are reasonable for a one-off gap and expensive as a permanent operating model.
The 28.8 day wait is not going away. What you can change is how much of your revenue you spend to avoid it.
Multi-Currency Invoicing for Freelancers: What to Bill in 2026
The dollar had its steepest year in three decades in 2025, FedNow now clears transactions up to ten million, SEPA Instant became mandatory across the euro area in October 2025, and stablecoin rails settled trillions of dollars. The old rule of "just bill everyone in USD" no longer holds. This is how to think about currency choice on freelance invoices in 2026.
Should you invoice in your client's currency, in your own, or default to USD? Dollar volatility, FedNow at scale, the EU's SEPA Instant mandate, and stablecoin rails have all changed the answer in 2026. This is the calm framework for picking the currency on each invoice — and the FX cost you actually pay.
