What the data says about getting paid, and why chasing is the wrong game

The contract is signed, the price is agreed, the work is done and the client is happy. The only question left is when the money actually lands, and the honest answer is that nobody quite knows. Next week, maybe. Next month, maybe.

A $7 trillion pile of unpaid invoices

The scale is hard to picture. At the end of 2025, US non-financial businesses were sitting on $7.2 trillion of trade receivables, money owed for goods and services already delivered. a16z's chartpost on the data, built from the Federal Reserve's accounts and from Stuut's collections ledger, points out that at that scale even a single extra day of delay across the economy is worth around $150 billion. And with interest rates where they are, none of the waiting is free.

You are not a multinational, but the mechanics are identical on a smaller stage. A final payment that slips from this month to next is money you have already spent, in materials and wages, sitting in someone else's account instead of yours.

Getting paid is a “results may vary” process

There is no single answer to how long money sits unpaid. In the data, a tenth of invoices are paid within a day, and half turn to cash within 25 days with little chasing. Then the tail stretches: getting from 70% paid to 90% paid takes you from day 37 all the way to day 74, and the slowest tenth drift far beyond that.

For a builder, that slow tail is almost always the same invoice: the final payment, the one held back until the client decides they are happy. The bulk of the job pays on time. It is the last slice, often the difference between a good month and a bad one, that stalls.

The money that goes missing, goes missing in size

Collections is usually pictured as a volume game: thousands of small reminders grinding down a long tail. The data shows the opposite. For a typical business, the biggest tenth of overdue invoices holds around 66% of all the overdue money. The smallest 80% of late invoices are fighting over the last fifth of it.

The takeaway is not “chase harder”, it is “chase the right one”. A handful of invoices move the number. For a contractor that is clarifying: your risk is not the £200 snag payment, it is the £8,000 final stage on the kitchen. Protect that one and you have protected almost all of your exposure.

Bigger invoices are not dramatically slower to pay on a normal day, but they are far more capable of stalling badly:

Same typical speed, very different worst case. The larger the sum, the longer it can hang, and the a16z data notes that about a quarter of concentrated overdue money has already sat untouched past 90 days, which is where late money quietly turns into money you never see.

Getting paid takes asking, and the promises mean nothing

Here is the part that stings. In the data, only about half of the payment promises that came due were actually kept. And it made no difference to the outcome: clients who broke a promise and clients who kept every one paid at the same 41-day median afterwards. “We'll sort it Friday” tells you almost nothing.

What does hold up is that asking works, and it does not take as many asks as people fear. Half of collected overdue invoices close within two asks, and nine in ten within six. But every one of those asks lands on someone who is still your customer, and the next job you want. That is the trap of chasing: the person you have to lean on for this payment is the same person you are hoping will recommend you for the next one.

The best collections strategy is not having to collect

a16z's conclusion is that machines can now do most of the asking: in the data, more than 80% of collection emails go out with no human involved, freeing people for the genuine disputes. That is smart, but it still assumes the money is out there to be chased in the first place.

Renno starts one step earlier. Instead of getting better at chasing the final payment, it removes the reason to chase. The client funds each stage into a protected wallet before the work begins, and you are released the moment a stage is signed off. See how it works for contractors. No 25-day wait, no broken “pay you Friday”, no leaning on the client you want to work for again.

This article summarises third-party data for general information and is not financial or legal advice. Figures are drawn from a16z's “What It Takes to Get Paid” (August 2026) and its cited sources, Stuut and the US Federal Reserve.