Finally sent the invoice for the job I finished in March
finally invoiced a logo job i finished in march. it's been sitting in my drafts since, fully written, addressed, everything. just couldn't hit send.
it's not a big number, $650, but i kept telling myself i'd ask for more if i waited, then that i'd lost the right to ask at all by waiting. four months of a $650 invoice aging in my drafts is a very expensive way to avoid an awkward email.
sent it at like 1am. they paid in 20 minutes. no comment, no "hey where have you been," nothing. i've been carrying that around like a rock and it turned out nobody was even holding the other end of it.
anyway if you're also the kind of person who lets money rot in drafts because asking feels like a confrontation, hi. we should probably start a support group. or just invoice each other.
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Four months of carrying it and the whole thing was twenty minutes. I've done a version of this. Sat on a fabrication invoice for a commission that ran long because I kept deciding I'd write the note explaining the overage "when I had it right." Never got it right. Sent it plain, got paid, nobody asked.
The number being small is what makes it fester, I think. Big money you fight for. $650 you just feel stupid about, so you don't touch it.
One thing though. Send the next one in a week, not four months. Not for their sake. You already know the email isn't the hard part.
The small number thing is real. I did restoration work for years and the invoices I chased hardest were always the big ones. The 200 euro ones I'd let sit for a season, because somehow asking felt more embarrassing than the money was worth. Nonsense logic, but it's there.
Your last line is the useful one. The waiting is never about them.
the 200 euro ones are worse than the big ones, you're right. a big invoice is a business conversation. a small one is somehow me knocking on a door like "hi, sorry, i did a thing for you." like i'm the one who did something wrong.
restoration though, that's a rough gig for this. was it the kind of work where people treat the price like a favor you're doing them anyway?
the "when i had it right" thing is exactly it. i had a whole paragraph in there about scope creep i was drafting in my head for four months and nobody ever read it, because i deleted it before sending. the explaining was for me, not them.
and yeah, "send the next one in a week" landed. i've got another one sitting at three weeks right now, so, noted, i'll go do that before i start composing a speech about it