Late-paying café accounts: terms, chasing and when to stop

Short answer. Set terms per account rather than one policy for everyone: new cafés prepay or pay on delivery for the first two or three months, then move to net 14 or net 30 on a record of paying, inside a credit limit of about six weeks of their orders. Put a real due date on the invoice, send it to the person who pays, and follow a fixed ladder: a reminder before the date, a call at day 3, a firm email at day 7, a stop on new orders at day 14, a formal letter at day 30, and a decision at day 60. Chasing early is not aggressive. It is the only thing that keeps you from being the supplier who gets paid last.

Why late payment costs a roastery more than it costs most suppliers

Because you have already paid for the coffee, a long time ago. Green is bought and paid for six to twelve months before a café orders the roasted bag, so a roastery is financing its customers' stock out of its own working capital before a single invoice is issued. A roaster told Fresh Cup, in its August 2026 survey of 30 roasters, what that feels like from the other side: "Pay your bills on time. We're not your bank. Financing is the most expensive part of this." The roaster who said it does 150,000 lb a year.

The credit behind that is getting harder to find. Perfect Daily Grind reported in March 2025 that banks are tightening lending to roasters, and that Bailies in Belfast uses a stocking facility, where a lender finances the green coffee itself, to bridge the gap between paying for a container and selling what is in it. Most small roasteries have no such facility. They have an overdraft, or they have the owner's own money. By August 2025 the same publication was reporting roasters delaying payments to their own packaging and equipment suppliers, which is what a squeezed roastery does before it tells anyone.

Put a number on it. A roastery billing €25,000 a month ex VAT sells about €822 of coffee a day. What it is owed at any moment is that daily figure multiplied by how long its cafés actually take to pay:

Sales per day = monthly sales ex VAT × 12 ÷ 365. Owed = sales per day × average days to pay. Your own figure: divide the total of your unpaid invoices by your sales per day.

Every 15 days of drift on that book is €12,300 you are lending, free, to cafés. At €8 a kilo that is about 1,500 kg of green you cannot buy, which matters more than the €1,100 of interest, because the green is the thing you cannot get later. And the cafés are not choosing at random. As one roaster put it on r/roasting in 2024, "they will pay the people that lower the boom first and you last". Another, in the same discussion: "By not chasing unpaid invoices you are giving people an interest free loan PLUS free product."

What follows is the process. The clauses themselves — payment terms, the late payment clause, retention of title, the credit limit wording — and the EU rules behind them are in the wholesale terms and conditions template, which covers the Late Payment Directive's 60-day limit on payment periods, statutory interest at the reference rate plus eight points, and the €40 per late invoice, with the rates by country. Read that once, decide your numbers, and then never think about it again except on day 30.

Decide terms per account, not one policy for everyone

One payment policy for every café is either too loose for the new ones or too tight for the good ones. Set terms per account, in three stages, and write down which stage each café is on.

1. Months 1 to 3: payment before delivery, or on delivery. The café pays by transfer before the van leaves, or by card or transfer at the door. This is not an insult and it costs a solvent café nothing. It is also the period when most of the risk sits: a café that opens, orders twice and closes takes your coffee with it.
2. After three months of paying: net 14. Short enough that a problem shows up inside a month, long enough to be normal trade terms. Net 14 also suits a weekly delivery rhythm, because the café is never more than two deliveries ahead of its payments.
3. For established accounts that have never missed: net 30. Give it as something earned, and say so when you give it. An account that knows net 30 was a decision is an account that notices when you take it back.

Two rules make the stages work. First, the move between stages is a conversation, not a drift — tell the café it has moved, on the phone, and the terms mean something. Second, the stage is written on the account, not in your head, so whoever covers for you in August knows that Café Aurora prepays.

Longer terms exist in the trade and you can refuse them. A hotel group or a contract caterer will ask for 60 days as a matter of policy. That is within the EU limit, but it means you carry two months of their coffee. If you agree, price it: the non-café accounts guide covers what those clients cost to serve, and 60-day terms are part of that cost.

The credit check a small roastery can actually do

You are not going to buy a credit report on a café that might take 10 kg a week. Four checks cost nothing and take about twenty minutes, and together they catch most of what a paid report would tell you.

The company registry

Every EU country has one, and most let you search by name for free. You are looking for four things: that the company exists under the name on the application, who the directors are, how old it is, and whether there is any insolvency or strike-off entry against it. If the café trades under a name that is not the registered name, get both — the invoice needs the legal one. Check the VAT number in the EU's VIES service at the same time, which you need for a correct B2B invoice anyway.

How old the café is

The first two years are where the failures are. That is not a reason to refuse an account, because a new café is also your best chance of being its first roaster. It is a reason to keep it on prepayment longer and to set the credit limit low. A café that has traded five years under the same owner is a different proposition from one that opened in March.

A trade reference

Ask for one supplier who already invoices them — a dairy, a bakery, a soft drinks wholesaler, the previous roaster. Then actually call, and ask one question: "Do they pay you on time?" Suppliers answer this honestly, because they have nothing to gain by covering for a late payer. The application form field is on the account application template; the phone call is the part most roasteries skip.

What you can see yourself

You are going to be standing in the place. Is it busy at 10 on a Tuesday, or only at the weekend? Is the fit-out finished, or is there a half-built counter and a rented machine? Has the staff changed twice since you first visited? None of this is decisive and all of it is information you have that a credit agency does not.

Then start small regardless of what the checks say. First order at or below the minimum, paid before delivery, and a credit limit that would not hurt if it went. The onboarding guide covers the rest of the first 30 days.

The credit limit, and when to review it

A credit limit is the total a café can owe you — unpaid invoices plus coffee delivered but not yet invoiced — before an order is held. Set it at about six weeks of that account's expected orders. For a café taking 16 kg a week of house espresso at €18.20, that is €291 a week, so roughly €1,750, which you would write as €1,500 or €2,000.

Six weeks is the right size because it covers net 30 plus one delivery cycle plus a normal amount of lateness, and no more. A limit of three months lets an account quietly become a problem you cannot afford to lose. A limit of two weeks stops deliveries to cafés that are paying fine.

• Start new accounts at one or two orders, whatever the arithmetic says, and raise it after three months of paying.
• Raise it when you raise prices. A 10% price rise makes every limit 10% tighter without anyone deciding to.
• Raise it before a seasonal peak, not during one. A café that goes from 16 to 25 kg a week in December hits a limit set in June, on the day it can least afford a held order.
• Lower it when the record changes. An account that has been late three times in a row does not need a bigger limit because it is buying more.
• Count equipment separately. The credit limit is coffee. A café with a €9,000 machine on loan is a larger exposure than its coffee balance suggests.

The limit only works if the order actually stops. A limit that everyone knows you will override is a note in a file.

What to put on the invoice so it gets paid

A surprising share of late payment is not a decision. It is an invoice that went to the wrong person, or that nobody could act on without asking you something first. Every one of these removes a reason to put it in a pile.

• The legal name and VAT number of the business, not the trading name on the awning. A bookkeeper who cannot match the invoice to a supplier record parks it.
• The purchase order number, or the name of the person who ordered. Larger accounts will not pay without one. For a small café, "Ordered by Marta, delivered Tuesday 6 October" does the same job.
• The due date as a date. "Payable by 20 October 2026", not "Net 30". Net 30 from what — the order, the delivery, the invoice, the end of the month? Everyone counts differently and everyone counts in their own favour.
• Bank details on the invoice itself. IBAN and BIC, the account name, and the invoice number given as the payment reference. Not in the email body, not in a signature block, not on a previous invoice.
• One contact for questions, with a name, a direct email and a phone number. A query that goes to a general inbox becomes a fortnight.
• The delivery notes it covers. The café's own check is against what arrived. Make that check take a minute.
• Sent to the person who pays. Collect the invoice contact when you open the account, separately from the ordering contact. Chasing an invoice through the head barista gets nowhere, and it puts them in an awkward position with their own owner.
• Sent the day you deliver. An invoice held for month-end billing starts its own clock late and arrives in a batch of twenty others.

Where you are selling across a border, or into a country that has moved to structured B2B e-invoicing, the legal invoice comes out of your invoicing software in the required format. The PDF the café reads is a copy of it, and everything above still applies to the copy.

A chasing ladder, day by day

The value of a ladder is that it removes the decision. You are not judging each week whether this is the week to call Café Aurora; the calendar is. Every roastery that chases well has something like this, and every roastery that chases badly is improvising.

Three things about the ladder matter more than the exact days. Escalate the channel, not the volume: email, then phone, then letter, each one calmer than the last. Keep a written record of every step, because it is worth nothing to a collection agency or a court if it happened on the phone and nobody wrote it down. And never let the chase be the only contact — if the last four times you rang were about money, you have become a debt, not a supplier.

The two hardest steps are the day 3 call and the day 14 hold. Both are easier with the words already decided.

The day 3 call

"Hi [name], it's [you] from [roastery]. Nothing urgent — invoice [2026-418] for [€546] was due on [Monday] and I don't think it's landed. Has it gone out?

[Listen.]

That's fine. When do you think it'll go?

[Get a date. Say it back.]

[Thursday], good, I'll note that. And is there anything at your end I should fix — is it going to the right address, is anything unclear on it?

Thanks. While I've got you: the [Ethiopian] lands next week and I've put [two] kilos aside for you."

The shape of it is: assume it is an oversight, ask when rather than whether, get a date and repeat it back, ask whether the problem is yours, and finish on coffee. If they give you a date and miss it, that is the piece of information you actually needed, and day 7 is a different conversation.

The day 14 hold

"Hi [name]. I need to talk to you about the account before Thursday's order.

The balance is [€1,240] across [two] invoices, the oldest [24] days. I told you on [date] that we'd have to hold new orders at 14 days, so I'm calling before I do it rather than after: we can't send Thursday's order until that's cleared.

[Stop. Let them answer.]

I'd much rather send the coffee. If [€546] — the oldest one — is paid today or tomorrow, Thursday goes as normal and we sort the rest out on the usual terms.

If it's a cash-flow problem, tell me now and we'll write down a plan you can actually keep. What I can't do is keep adding to it.

What would you like to do?"

Say the hold and then be quiet. The offer to release Thursday's order on a partial payment is the part that works: it gives the café a way out that is smaller than the whole balance, and it tells you immediately whether this is disorganisation or something worse. If they take the payment plan, put it in writing the same day — the amounts, the dates, and what happens to deliveries in the meantime — and treat a missed instalment as day 30.

One thing not to do: do not hold an order without warning. A café that opens on a Saturday with no coffee because you decided on Friday will tell everyone about it, and it will be the only part of the story that gets repeated.

When late payment is really an account leaving

Sometimes the invoice is not the problem. A café that has decided to move roasters often stops paying before it stops ordering, because it is keeping its cash for the deposit and the first orders somewhere else. So read payment behaviour alongside ordering behaviour, not separately.

The pattern that should worry you is late payment arriving together with a change in the orders: a slightly longer gap between them, a smaller basket, the seasonal dropped and only the house espresso kept, a switch from ordering in its own account to text messages. Late payment on its own, from an account still ordering its usual on its usual day, is almost always administration. Late payment plus a shrinking order is a departure in progress, and the call it needs is about the relationship, not the invoice.

How to see the ordering half of that in the first week rather than at the quarter end is a guide in itself: spotting a café account going quiet has the method and the spreadsheet. The overlap to remember here is that an account which is both drifting and behind is the one to ring today, and the one whose credit limit should come down before it goes up.

When the café that owes you has your espresso machine

This is the situation that turns a €1,200 problem into a €10,000 one, and it needs to be handled as two separate agreements that you deal with in one conversation.

Check the loan agreement before you make any decision about the coffee. It should say who owns the machine, what happens to it when the account ends or when an invoice is unpaid, and what the buy-out price is this year. If it does say those things, you have options. If the machine went in on a handshake, you have a negotiation. The clauses, the buy-out schedule and the equipment register are in the espresso machine loan agreement guide.

• Do not remove a machine to force payment. Taking equipment out of a café that is still trading, without the agreement clearly allowing it and without notice, is the fastest way to turn a debt you might recover into a dispute you will pay a lawyer for. Follow what the agreement says, in writing, with the notice it requires.
• Do get the machine out of a café that is closing. When the shutters come down, a machine on the premises can end up with a landlord, an administrator or a buyer of the fit-out. The moment you hear the word "closing", ask about the machine in the same call.
• Do not lend more equipment to an account that is behind. A grinder to a café with a 40-day balance makes the exposure larger and the conversation harder.
• Do put the machine in the payment plan. "The balance clears at €300 a month and the machine stays" is an offer a café understands immediately, and it is usually the thing they most want to keep.
• Do keep the register current. Serial numbers, the address the machine is installed at, service dates and this year's buy-out price. If the account ends badly, that record is the whole of your case.

When an account will not pay at all

A small number of accounts simply do not pay. Your objective from here is to spend as little more time and money as the amount justifies, and then to be finished with it.

1. Send one formal notice. A full statement, the invoice numbers and dates, the statutory interest and the €40 per invoice you are entitled to, a deadline of seven days, and the specific next step you will take. Send it by post as well as email. Name the amount as a total, because a list of six invoices is easier to argue with than one number.
2. Offer mediation before a claim. It is much cheaper than a court, it is quick, and for a dispute about whether some of the coffee was faulty it often produces a payment where a demand produced silence. Several EU countries have low-cost business mediation schemes; your chamber of commerce will know the local one.
3. Small claims, or a payment order. For a domestic debt, your country's small claims procedure is designed for amounts this size and usually does not need a lawyer. For a café in another member state, the European Order for Payment handles claims the café does not dispute, and the European Small Claims Procedure covers cross-border claims up to €5,000. Both work on standard forms. The realistic question is not whether you would win — on an unpaid coffee invoice with delivery notes, you probably would — but whether there is anything left to collect.
4. Or a collection agency. It takes a percentage of what it recovers and it takes the job off your desk, which is worth a great deal at this stage. It works best on a debt that is clearly owed and undisputed, and where the café is still trading. Check what it will do in your name before you sign, because the way it behaves reflects on you in a small city.
5. Then write it off cleanly. Record it as a bad debt, ask your accountant about recovering the VAT you have already paid over, close the account so nobody takes an order from them by accident, get the equipment back, and stop. A retention of title clause is worth little on roasted coffee that has been drunk; it is worth something on an undelivered order in your own stockroom and on equipment.

Keep the file whatever you decide: the signed terms, the application, the delivery notes, the invoices, and the dated record of every chase. It costs nothing to keep and it is the difference between a claim and a grievance. And be honest in the write-off about what it really cost — not only the €1,240, but the green behind it, the delivery runs, and the hours. That total is the argument for prepayment on the next new café that feels similar.

How to stop needing any of this

Almost everything above is recovery. Prevention is cheaper, and most of it is about the size and the rhythm of the exposure rather than about enforcement.

• Prepayment where it belongs. First orders, new businesses, accounts coming back after a hold, and anyone whose trade reference was lukewarm. A deposit at the start of a relationship is normal; asking for one after a problem is a demotion.
• Shorter invoicing cycles. Weekly invoicing rather than monthly means a problem shows up after seven days rather than five weeks, and the balance at risk is a quarter of the size. It costs one more click a week.
• Smaller, more frequent deliveries. Two 8 kg deliveries a week instead of one 16 kg one halves what an account owes you at its peak, and fresher coffee is an easier thing to sell than a payment policy. The trade-off is the van, so do it where the route already passes.
• Standing orders on a short cycle. A regular weekly order is also a regular weekly invoice, which is the smoothest possible pattern for both sides and the easiest to spot a break in.
• Direct debit, if your bank offers it. A SEPA direct debit mandate for the whole account means the money moves on the due date without anyone deciding to move it, which removes the ladder entirely for the accounts that agree to it. See what the payment methods cost you before you choose between transfer, card and direct debit.
• Reward paying early instead of punishing paying late. Interest is a threat you will not use on a café you want to keep. First pick of a limited lot, a slot in the guest coffee rotation, a bag of the new seasonal for the bar team, or a training visit — these cost you little and they go to the accounts you want more of.

Be careful with early payment discounts specifically, because they are expensive money. A 2% discount for paying 23 days early works out at about 32% a year; even 1% is about 16%, against an overdraft at 9%. If you offer one, offer it where the alternative is genuinely 60-day drift, not to accounts that were going to pay on time anyway.

And check the whole book once a quarter, not just the account that is annoying you. Total unpaid divided by sales per day gives your average days to pay. If that number is 52 and your terms say 30, the problem is the process, not one café.

Questions roasters ask

What payment terms should I give a new café account?

Payment before delivery, or on delivery, for the first two or three months, then net 14 or net 30 once the café has a record with you. A café that has been trading for two months has no payment history anywhere, and the first orders are the ones you are most likely to lose. Say in your terms that new accounts prepay, so it is a policy rather than a judgement about them.

When should I stop delivering to a café that owes me money?

At about 14 days overdue, after a call and a written warning, and not for the first time without warning. Write the rule into your terms so the café agreed to it before it happened, tell them by phone before the email, and be clear that the hold is on new orders rather than on the relationship. Restarting is easy; a €3,000 balance on a café that has closed is not.

Should I charge a café interest on a late invoice?

You are entitled to in the EU, and you will rarely claim it. Statutory interest and a fixed €40 per late invoice apply between businesses without a reminder under the Late Payment Directive. The value of the clause is that the café knows it exists and pays you before the supplier whose terms say nothing, which is exactly why it belongs in your written terms.

How do I ask a café for money without losing the account?

Ask when, not whether, and ask the person who pays rather than the person who orders. Most late payment in café wholesale is disorganisation, not refusal, so a short call that ends with a named date solves it. Keep the chase separate from the coffee: the same week you call about the invoice, call about the new seasonal.

What is a reasonable credit limit for a café account?

About six weeks of that account's expected orders. A café taking 16 kg a week of house espresso at €18.20 buys about €291 a week, so six weeks is roughly €1,750, which you would round to €1,500 or €2,000. Start new accounts lower, raise the limit on a record of paying, and review every limit when you review prices.

Can I write off unpaid coffee against tax?

A debt you can show is genuinely irrecoverable is normally a bad debt for tax purposes, and most EU countries also let you recover the VAT you already paid over on the invoice. The conditions and the waiting period differ by country, and some require a formal step such as proof of insolvency or a court claim. Ask your accountant before you write anything off, and keep the file.

Where Order Book fits

Be clear about what it does not do first. Order Book does not collect or process payments, it does not issue invoices, and it does not chase them. There is no dunning, no automatic reminder to a late café, no card on file, no accounting sync. The invoice comes out of your own invoicing software and the chasing is done by you, on the ladder above.

What it holds is the picture you chase from. Payments you receive are recorded against each account, or a single order is marked as paid, so the client page shows a running balance of everything delivered less any credit you gave and everything paid, and the Who owes you card in Insights shows at a glance which accounts are behind and by how much. Each client record carries its own payment terms, so the stage an account is on is written down rather than remembered. Your own invoice PDF attaches to the order and the café is emailed it, which is also the copy you point at on the day 7 email. The client page lists what has actually been delivered and when, with the delivery notes behind it — the record a query, a payment plan or a claim is built on. And orders export for your accountant, so the month reconciles without retyping.

Drift detection is the other half of it: an account that is both behind on payment and ordering off its own rhythm appears on the call list in the first weeks, which is when a late invoice is still an oversight.

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