Chasing payments: A self employed musicians' guide to invoice etiquette

This article was originally published in our Summer 2024 issue. Click here to subscribe to our quarterly print magazine and be the first to read our January 2025 issue features.

For the 21st century musician, invoices are a fact of life. None of us entered music college dreaming of a career spent balancing spreadsheets, but being a self-employed musician means being responsible for all aspects of your business, and accountancy is no exception. An invoice is simply a document notifying a client that payment is due, but mistakes can be costly and there are a few pitfalls that musicians can occasionally fall foul of.

The first step to efficient invoicing is setting up an invoice template. Every invoice needs to have your name, address and contact details, invoice number, the name and address of the person or company you are invoicing, a description of services rendered, the amount, payment terms, and your bank details. As well as the basic requirements it also makes sense to include your National Insurance number and Unique Taxpayer Reference. As a courtesy to your employers, it is good practice to include a statement to the effect that you are self-employed and responsible for your own tax and National Insurance.

Much of this may seem obvious, but Louise Herrington, an accountant specialising in musicians, says that her clients have been known to send invoices missing crucial information such as their bank details. Her many years of experience wading through the chaotic jumble of musicians’ accounts have made her a passionate advocate for financial education in the industry, guest lecturing at the Royal Academy of Music and publishing a book entitled The Singing Accountant’s Guide to Tax and Accounts.

Classes such as Herrington’s are usually not compulsory at music colleges, and with students drowning in preparation for performance exams they can often be ignored. However, they are invaluable for arming young musicians with the practical knowledge they need to navigate the profession. Herrington says: ‘Three years after graduating they come through to you [as a client] and say, “We never got taught this at college.” But I taught it there! People are leaving music college, going out into the big bad world, nobody is there to help them, so they’re just kind of making it up. They may play the violin really well, but have no business craft whatsoever.’

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Herrington says that the number one mistake musicians make is simply not raising invoices in the first place. An invoice doesn’t just tell fixers how and when to pay you, it also acts as a record for tax purposes. Not all clients will require you to submit an invoice in order to release payment. The temptation can be simply to watch the fee land in your bank account and enjoy the refreshing lack of admin. Unfortunately, as Herrington explains, not raising a sequentially numbered invoice for every engagement can land you in hot water with the tax man:

‘If HMRC then inspects the tax return, they’ve got nothing to go on. Even if they look at bank statements, they don’t know if there’s a second bank statement. If they look at invoices and they are consecutively numbered, HMRC has got some form of warm comfy feeling that there’s going to be nothing missing.

‘A lot of people don’t number invoices sequentially. They give a little code at the beginning, like LPO01 or ROH01, and you think, “well, is there anything between L and R?” So again, it doesn’t give HMRC any comfort factor.’

Invoicing software and apps can be useful for staying on top of things, allowing you to send and keep track of invoices on a user-friendly platform. With Making Tax Digital due to hit us in 2026-27, it will soon be necessary for everybody with a self-employed income over £30k to have fully digitised records submitted through compatible software. If you are still an invoicing luddite drafting everything in a word processor it might perhaps be a good time to take the digital plunge. Herrington is evangelical about Xero, but concedes that its £30 per month subscription fee is on the hefty side. However, she also predicts that more apps will come out as we get closer to April 2026. Whatever you do, always make sure you back up your records, especially before switching to a new software.

Small errors on an invoice can generate big problems. Kathryn Wood is the legal officer for the Independent Society of Musicians (ISM). Wood’s experience of chasing payments on behalf of ISM members leads her to issue a warning about how seemingly unimportant things can come back to haunt you:

‘One thing that definitely trips people up is making sure you have an address for the other person. People think that you don’t really need an address anymore because everything is done by email or by phone. But if you’re then not paid, you need to have a street address to validly identify the person or organisation that owes you the money. If you haven’t got that address then it’s really hard to pursue. You can’t take court action unless you’ve got the full legal name and address of the other party.

‘If you’re being booked by an orchestra or a venue then it’s usually easy to get an address because it’ll be a registered company. The problem that arises is when you’ve got fixers that are not registered as a company. We see so many people who have been booked via Instagram or just by text or Facebook message. You go and do the work and send the invoice and it’s never paid. Then you look up the organisation or the agency and you can’t find a company name, you can’t find a website, you can’t even find a person behind this wall of a social media page.’

Statutory payment terms are 30 days, but Wood recommends clarifying prior to invoicing: ‘Some smaller businesses might be happy to receive an invoice and then pay it immediately on receipt. Larger ones that have more complex accounting departments will usually take a little bit longer, and there might be more hoops that you have to jump through, such as getting onto their payment systems or adding a purchase order number to your invoicing.

‘People sometimes think there’s a magic way of getting quick payment by sticking on their invoice that they want payment in five working days. But if that’s not what was agreed beforehand then you’ll have a hard time actually pursuing somebody for payment within that term.’

For engagements when you are contracting other musicians it is prudent to build some slack into the system if possible by invoicing the promoter with shorter terms than the terms with which your colleagues are invoicing you. This enables you to pay your musicians on time without being out of pocket even if the client is late paying you.

Musicians can sometimes feel reticent about chasing late payments out of a desire not to be seen as troublesome. In the first instance, send a friendly and courteous message implying that you believe the missing payment is due to a simple oversight rather than wilful withholding of funds. In most cases this should result in a quick resolution. Wood offers some advice on how to proceed if payment isn’t forthcoming: ‘If you don’t get a satisfactory response you can escalate and say, “Our agreement was that payment was due by this date and that date has now passed, so this needs to be paid.” You can then escalate further by having an organisation like the ISM write a formal letter on headed paper setting out the legal position. We do recover a lot of payments in that way.’

Legal action should only be a last resort – even with the financial and legal support of organisations such as the ISM or the Musicians Union, it is a lengthy and stressful process.

It can be helpful as a deterrent to include a statement on your invoices that you reserve the right to charge statutory interest for late payments. With musicians’ reliance on maintaining good relationships with fixers, is charging interest on late payments something Herrington sees her clients actually doing?

‘I don’t see a pattern of people doing it. It does tend to ruin relationships. What you have to look at is, are you going to be working for those people again? Is it a one-off wedding? If you’re not likely to ever see that person again, is it really going to be too bad to say, “You’ve had the invoice for two months now and I’m charging interest on it.”? However, if you are invoicing for regular work in the West End then that might harm your reputation. And in our industry word of mouth carries. But again, swings and roundabouts on that front, because guess what? They’re not clients if they’re not paying you.’