The Bill You Decided Not To Chase

There is a list somewhere of money owed to you. Some of it is from last month. Some of it is from two years ago and everybody knows it is never arriving.

⚠️ The old entries do not sit there because anybody decided to keep them. They sit there because closing one requires a person to say out loud "we are not getting this," and nobody wants to be that person.

The short version

• Uncollectable amounts on the books make every other figure wrong
• Nobody writes them off because writing off feels like an admission
• Closing a bill is a deletion-class decision — it needs the owner, not the clerk
• "Never chased" and "chased and failed" are completely different categories
• Whatever you close, record who decided and when

Why leaving them is not neutral

What the list says	What it does
"£40,000 outstanding"	Makes cashflow planning meaningless
"Forty accounts in arrears"	Buries the six that are real
"We'll chase when there's time"	Guarantees the list only grows

⚠️ The cost is not the money — it is that nobody can see the real number. Six genuine debts hidden among forty dead ones get the same attention as the forty, which is none.

One: the two categories that must be separated

Before anything else, split the list in half.

Attempted   somebody tried to collect and failed
Never tried an invoice exists and nothing was ever done

⚠️ These look identical on a list and mean opposite things. The first is a collection problem. The second is an admin gap, and some of it is probably collectable right now.

The sorting question

For each line: has anybody actually asked for this money?

⇒ If the answer is no, it does not belong in "arrears" yet. An untried bill is not a bad debt — it is an unsent request.

⇒ Related shape: the messages that never arrived — the request may have been sent and never delivered.

Two: what makes an amount genuinely dead

Not everything old is dead, and not everything recent is alive.

Dead    the business closed
Dead    the relationship ended badly and they will not pay
Dead    the amount is smaller than the cost of collecting it
Alive   they are still trading and you still deal with them
Alive   they have paid you since

⚠️ "They have paid you since" is the strongest signal of all. If somebody is settling current invoices while an old one sits open, the old one is usually a dispute or an error, not a refusal.

The check that resolves most of them

For each old amount: have they paid anything after this date?

⇒ Two outcomes, both useful. If yes, go and ask about the specific old item. If no, they stopped being a customer, and that tells you which list it belongs on.

Three: closing one is a deletion, not a tidy-up

This is the part that gets people into trouble.

Feels like  tidying up an old list
Actually is deciding not to collect money

⚠️ It sits in the same category as deleting records or issuing a refund, and it should follow the same rule: the owner decides, not whoever happens to be looking at the list.

The rule worth adopting

Money out, deletion, and writing off - always the owner.
Whatever the amount.

⇒ Amount is the wrong test, because a small write-off and a large one are the same kind of decision. Using size as the threshold is how a clerk ends up closing forty items on a quiet afternoon.

⇒ On the related gap between what was approved and what was done: the approval that covered less than you did.

Four: what to record when you close one

The closing itself takes a second. The record is the part that matters.

What was closed      amount, date, account
Why                  in one sentence
Who decided          by name
When they decided    the date, not the date you actioned it

⚠️ The fourth line is the one everybody omits and the one that is needed later. A record showing an action with no decision behind it is indefensible, however sensible the action was.

The failure this prevents

Two years later somebody asks why £40,000 left the ledger
The record shows it was closed
Nothing shows who agreed

⇒ At that point the person who did it is explaining rather than referring, and the explanation is worth far less than one line written at the time.

Five: keep the tool, not just the outcome

If closing several items involves any kind of bulk operation, keep whatever you used.

⚠️ We learned this the direct way. A batch of old invoices was closed here in one go, using something written for that afternoon and not kept. The outcome is recorded — the count, the total, the accounts. What is not recorded is exactly what was run, which means the work cannot be re-examined or repeated.

Recorded    46 items, a total, five accounts
Not recorded what was actually executed
⇒ the result can be read but not verified

⇒ The rule is narrow and cheap: anything that touches money gets saved as a named file, not typed and discarded. The same applies to a spreadsheet formula or a filtered list — save the version you actually used.

Six: the zero-value invoices nobody notices

A specific nuisance worth naming.

Some systems raise an invoice for £0 at the start of a trial
It sits as "paid" because there was nothing to pay

⚠️ These inflate your paid count and tell you nothing. We counted our own: of 189 settled invoices this year, 117 were for zero. Counting settlements rather than amounts would have given a number that was 62% noise.

⇒ Count money, not documents. "189 payments" and "£1.96m across 16 subscriptions" describe the same year and only one of them is useful.

Seven: after the clean-up

Once the list is honest, keep it that way with one habit.

Monthly: any invoice older than 60 days gets a decision.
Chase it, dispute it, or close it. Not "leave it."

⚠️ "Leave it" is the option that created the original list, and it is always available, which is why it has to be explicitly removed.

What the three outcomes need

Chase   a named person and a date
Dispute a conversation, not a reminder
Close   the owner's decision, recorded

Numbers worth keeping

One   Total outstanding, split: attempted vs never attempted
Two   The oldest item still open, and its date
Three How many of the outstanding accounts have paid you since
Four  Amounts, not document counts, everywhere

⚠️ Three is the most revealing. An account paying current invoices while an old one sits open is almost always an unresolved dispute, and those are collectable.

The card for the office

────────────────────────
  Old money owed

  1. Has anybody actually asked for it?
  2. Have they paid us anything since that date?
  3. Are they still trading?
  4. Closing it = owner's decision, recorded with a name.

  Count amounts, not invoices.
────────────────────────

Common objections

"We might still get it"

⇒ Then chase it this week. "Might" with no action is how it reached two years old.

"Writing it off looks like we failed"

⚠️ Carrying it looks like you have forty accounts in arrears. One of those is a worse picture.

"It's only small amounts"

⇒ Then the decision is easy and should take a minute. Small amounts are not a reason to skip the record.

"Our accountant handles that"

⚠️ They handle the accounting treatment. The decision to stop pursuing a customer is a business decision, and it is yours.

"We'll do it at year end"

⇒ At year end you will have less information and more pressure. The facts about each item are freshest now.

What to do this week

One   Split the outstanding list: attempted vs never attempted.
Two   Send the never-attempted ones. Today.
Three For the rest, check who has paid you since.
Four  Take the genuinely dead ones to the owner as one list.
Five  Record the decision with a name and a date.

Summary

• Dead entries make every other figure unreadable
• "Never chased" and "chased and failed" are different problems
• Writing off is a deletion-class decision — owner only, any amount
• Record who decided and when, not just what was done
• Keep whatever tool you used; an outcome without a method cannot be checked
• Count amounts, not invoices — zero-value documents are noise

Nobody wants to be the person who says the money is not coming. That is precisely why it has to be a decision somebody makes, rather than one the list makes by default.