The customer who says they never received the invoice

The scenario

You ring to chase an invoice that is now ten days overdue, and the customer sounds genuinely puzzled: they have no record of it, nothing in the inbox, nothing on the desk. As far as they are concerned the clock has not even started, because they cannot pay something they have never seen. It may be perfectly true — emails go astray, get filtered, or reach the wrong person — or it may be a soft way of buying time. Either way, you cannot simply insist they pay an invoice they say never arrived.

What's really going on

This claim sits on a spectrum. At one end it is entirely genuine: your invoice hit a spam filter, went to a staff member who has since left, or was sent to an address that bounces silently. At the other end it is a low-risk stall — easy to say, hard to disprove, and good for another week of delay. The useful thing is that you do not need to decide which it is. The same response works for both: confirm the address on file, resend immediately, and set a fresh short deadline. A genuine customer is satisfied; a stalling one finds the excuse quietly closed off.

Your options

Your realistic moves:

• Resend and reset. Send it again to a confirmed address while you are on the call, and agree a new due date a few days out.
• Verify the original send. Check your own records — when it went, to which address — so you can speak with confidence.
• Switch the delivery method. If email keeps failing, offer to send by post or to a second contact, or to a portal if they use one.

Doing the first two together is almost always right: it removes the excuse and proves you acted, all in one short conversation.

Recommended approach

Take the claim at face value, but close the gap on the spot. No problem — can I confirm the best email for accounts? I'll resend it now while we're talking, and we'll call it due on the 20th. Then actually resend before you hang up, and follow with a one-line note confirming the new date. This costs you almost nothing and removes any honest obstacle. Keep your own dispatch records — the date sent and the address used — so that if 'not received' becomes a recurring theme, you can see whether it is a real delivery problem to fix or a pattern to challenge. If non-receipt keeps happening with the same customer, that is worth tightening at the invoicing stage; the Academy library covers getting invoices to the right contact first time.

What to avoid

Do not argue about whether the original was sent — that debate goes nowhere and wastes the goodwill you need to get paid. Do not resend without agreeing a new, specific due date, or you simply hand the customer an open-ended extension. And do not ignore a repeat of the same claim: if a customer 'never receives' three invoices in a row, that is either a delivery fault on your side worth fixing or a stall worth naming, but it is not random.