Using late payment charges

Applies to : Office Accounting Express, Professional

A late payment charge is an invoice sent to your customer for not paying on time. Office Accounting Professional and Professional Plus helps you generate these based on your company preferences.

Late payment charge worksheet

Late payment charges work similar to batch invoices, where would normally send out late payment charges on a monthly basis to all your overdue customers, rather than creating them one by one. The Late payment charge worksheet helps you achieve this task.

This is how it works:

  • The late payment charge worksheet generates one late payment charge invoice on the selected date for each overdue customer based on the Company Preferences.
  • In the company preferences you can set an annual interest rate, a minimum charge, grace days (don’t apply charges if the customer is only a few days late), an additional fee on top of the charges, whether to calculate interest on interest, and whether to apply the charges from the invoice date or the due date.

  • You can edit the amounts before generating saving the late payment charge invoices as well as chose to ignore some of the late payment charges (in the example above, you would typically not charge the 50 pence).
  • When you press save and close the late payment charge invoices will be generated and they can be printed in bulk directly from the Invoice list.
  • The late payment charge invoice is identical to a regular invoice, except that it is titled “Late payment charge”.

Late payment charge invoice

Note : Office Accounting implements late payment charges according to the Late Payments of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act, which means using a actual/365 linear interest convention for calculating late payment charges –the charges will be based on the actual days the invoice is late and each year is considered to be 365 days.