To find out how common it is for businesses to send out invoices and then never be paid the money that they’re due, one study looked at just over 1,000 small businesses. The numbers that they found were perhaps not surprising, but they did shed light on how serious this issue is.
First and foremost, they claimed that about 17% of these businesses said they were still owed money that had never come in. Those invoices have been sent, and services and products have been rendered, but they had simply never been paid.
This is concerning in its own right, but you also have to extrapolate that out over all of the businesses in the United States. When you do that, it’s clear that there are probably tens of thousands of unpaid invoices out there, with businesses never getting the money that they need and losing their investment.
How long do they have to wait?
In some cases, businesses would be paid at a later date, and they had to endure long stretches of non-payment that could be very problematic. 70% of the businesses noted in the study above said that they had waited between one month and six months. But 8% said it had already been a year and they still hadn’t been paid. At a point like that, you can understand why they may begin to think that it’s doubtful that they would ever be able to collect that money on their own.
What can you do?
If you run a business and you’re facing non-payment issues like this, you know how it can really harm your company. You also know how unfair it feels. What you may need to do next is learn about all of the legal steps you can take to collect on that debt.
