Getting paid: invoices, net 30, net 60 and the follow up nobody does

A creator invoice needs about a dozen fields, and every one sits on a template you can download in a minute. That part is solved. The money goes missing on either side of it: in the payment term you never negotiated, which lived in the agency's terms and conditions and turned net 30 into net 60, and in the due date nobody tracked, so the follow-up went out three weeks late or never at all.

Why the template is the least of it

Search for a creator invoice and you get templates, generators, and advice about where to put your logo. None of it touches the two moments that decide whether you get paid on time.

Payment terms in creator deals typically run 30 to 90 days after the work is done, Digiday reported in February 2024. Creator Joy Ofodu told the publication that getting net 30 for sponsored content happens "maybe 50% of the time" and that "more commonly, I'm presented with net 60."

Then the term slips. In a 2024 survey of more than 500 influencers by the creator payments company Lumanu, 48 percent said they had been paid late that year, and 38.5 percent of those waited more than a month past the due date.

Neither number is a template problem.

Both are tracking problems, and tracking is what a system is for. You can start a free 7-day trial, no credit card.

What a creator invoice has to contain

Twelve fields. The first eleven get you paid. The last one is the one most creators leave off.

• Your legal business name and address, matching the entity that signed. A mismatch is a standard reason accounts payable kicks an invoice back.
• The brand's full legal entity and billing address. Their marketing name is often not the company that pays.
• A unique invoice number, sequential, never reused.
• The invoice date and the delivery date, separately. The payment term usually attaches to the second one.
• The purchase order or campaign reference. Without it your invoice sits unmatched in a queue, and nobody in that building considers it a problem.
• Line items mirroring the contract deliverables, one per deliverable and platform. Three Reels and one Story is four lines.
• Usage rights as its own line if you sold an extension. Bundled into the base fee, it goes invisible the next time the brand wants the window renewed.
• Net amount, tax rate, tax amount and gross total, in the contract currency.
• Your tax or VAT identification number where required.
• Bank details in the format their finance team needs, including who pays transfer fees cross-border.
• The payment term in words, exactly as the contract phrased it.
• The due date as a calendar date. Not "net 30". The actual date: due 12 September 2026.

Which fields are legally required depends on where you and the brand are registered. Invoice rules, tax treatment and retention periods are questions for an accountant in your country, worth asking once rather than guessing every quarter. This article is general information about how payment terms work, and it is not legal or tax advice.

What net 30 and net 60 actually mean

Net 30 means the full amount is due 30 calendar days after the start date the contract names. Net 60 means 60.

The number matters less than the start date, and the start date is where contracts get vague. It can be the invoice date, the delivery date, the date the brand receives the invoice, or the date they approve your campaign report. Two of those are under your control. Two are not.

Here is what each term does to a real month. Assume you post on 5 March and invoice the same day.

If the invoice can only go out once the brand signs off on your campaign report, add that lag to every row.

Where the payment term actually gets set

Not on the invoice. In the contract, in the compensation clause, before you shoot anything.

Agencies that negotiate these deals for a living work from a checklist, and the compensation section covers three things beyond the number: whether the fee is gross or net, the payment term, and the payment route. To map how this part runs, we went through 232 published videos from an agency that manages more than 350 creators. The warning about the term is consistent. Thirty days is common, sixty happens with some agencies, and a term you never raise ends up governed by that agency's standard terms and conditions. You then wait a month longer than planned while bills of your own come due.

The gap between the term on paper and the money in the account has been measured, though the best dataset is European. The European Commission's EU Payment Observatory Annual Report 2025 found agreed business-to-business terms across the EU averaged 43 days in 2024 while actual payment periods averaged 60.3 days, and that large companies were the latest payers in 16 of 20 Member States analysed. US creator experience points the same way, which is why net 60 gets offered more often than net 30.

The brands with the biggest budgets are often the slowest payers, and the term you are offered is usually optimistic.

Gross or net, and the payment route

A fee quoted as gross includes sales tax. A fee quoted as net does not, and tax gets added on top. Agree the wrong reading and you hand back the tax percentage out of your own margin, on every deliverable, for the whole campaign. Get it in writing before signing, in the same sentence as the number.

The route belongs in the contract too. Standard practice is a bank transfer rather than a consumer payment app: those carry fees somebody absorbs, they can be reversed, and cross-border they add a currency conversion nobody agreed a rate for. Name the currency, name who pays the transfer fees, and give bank details their finance system accepts first time.

What the law does when the contract says nothing

Several US states now set a default. New York's Freelance Isn't Free Act, in force since 28 August 2024 for engagements worth $800 or more, requires payment within 30 days of completion where the contract names no date (GBL § 1411) and provides double damages plus attorneys' fees for non-payment (§ 1414). Illinois' Freelance Worker Protection Act sets the same 30-day default for work valued at $500 or more in a 120-day period.

If you invoice European brands, the equivalent rules sit in Directive 2011/7/EU, which applies a 30-day default where no date is fixed and caps agreed business-to-business terms at 60 calendar days unless a longer period is expressly agreed and is not grossly unfair to the creditor. UK guidance uses the same 30-day default with statutory interest at 8 percent above the Bank of England base rate.

Whether any of it reaches your contract is a lawyer's question where you live. The point is narrower: a brand saying their terms are simply net 60 is stating a preference, and in some places that preference has a ceiling.

After the invoice: who notices on day 45

The most-cited dataset on freelance non-payment is still the Freelancers Union survey of 5,358 US freelancers, published in 2015 as The Costs of Nonpayment. Half of respondents had trouble collecting payment in a single year. Among those, 81 percent were paid late and 34 percent were never paid at all for some portion of the work. In advertising and marketing, 76 percent reported trouble getting paid at some point in their career.

The same survey shows what freelancers do about it. Repeated phone calls: 92 percent. Charged a late fee: 20 percent. Hired an attorney: 5 percent. Small claims court: 5 percent. The report concludes these methods have limited efficacy.

European data fills in the other half, and the pattern travels. The EU Payment Observatory found companies there spend an average of 9.85 hours a week chasing late payments, and that 73 percent said their clients pay late while only 24 percent admitted paying their own clients late.

Everybody is being paid late. Almost nobody thinks they are the one paying late. Your invoice is sitting in a queue behind other invoices, and the only variable you control is whether somebody is reminded it exists.

Whatever you track it in has to do three things: hold the due date as a date rather than the phrase "net 30", so it sorts; surface it the day it lapses without you going to look; and sit next to the deal, so the follow-up can name the campaign and the reference number without opening four files.

How to write the follow up that gets paid

Short, dated, unemotional, addressed to whoever can release the payment. The common failure is a warm apologetic note to your marketing contact, who has no access to the payment run and forwards it two days later.

Day 1 after the due date. One paragraph to your contact, copying accounts payable. Invoice number, purchase order reference, amount, the agreed term, the date it fell due. Attach the invoice again. Ask one question: is anything missing on your side that is holding this up. Often the answer is a missing PO number or a wrong entity name you can fix in five minutes.

Day 7. Reply in the same thread. Ask for a payment date specifically, since "any update" invites no answer.

Day 14. Address accounts payable directly and ask which payment run the invoice is scheduled for. Finance teams work in runs, and that is a question they can answer.

Day 30. A formal written notice referencing the contract clause and the term. Where your jurisdiction gives you a statutory remedy, this is where you note it applies. In New York, the Freelance Isn't Free Act provides double damages plus attorneys' fees for covered freelancers who are not paid.

Three habits keep the tone right: reference the contract instead of your feelings, never apologise for invoicing, and keep everything in one thread. In the Lumanu survey, more than 55 percent of influencers said they would likely not work with a brand or agency again after being paid late. Chasing an invoice is ordinary commercial hygiene, and the brands worth keeping treat it that way.

The other direction: what you owe your editor

The standard recommendation for creator teams is to bill creative freelancers per product or per package rather than hourly or as a revenue share. A price per thumbnail, a price for a bundle of ten.

That means a stream of small incoming invoices clustered around your production cycle, each a payment you owe with its own date. Creators who track outbound invoices carefully often track inbound ones not at all, then meet a month of editing costs on a bank statement. Attach every incoming invoice to the deal it belongs to, with the amount and the date you owe it.

Where Knowlix fits, and where it does not

Knowlix is an all-in-one AI business platform. On the money side of a creator business it does four things.

• Issues invoices from the deal. The deliverables, the fee and the agreed term are already on the record, so the invoice carries the campaign reference and the calendar due date without retyping.
• Tracks the payment term. The due date is a field, so a lapsed invoice is something the system knows about rather than something you have to remember.
• Drafts the follow-up. Your AI teammate writes the note with the invoice number, the term and the date it fell due already in it. You read it, you approve it, it sends. It sends nothing on its own.
• Keeps the paperwork with the deal. Invoices and receipts stored against the campaign they belong to, originals retained, in both directions. (Document storage is a Knowlix-built capability. How it is priced is still being confirmed internally, so this article makes no pricing claim about it.)

Now the limits, because this article sits close to a line.

Bookkeeping, accounting and tax filing are not part of the standard version. They are available through the Knowlix enterprise version. What the standard version does with money is the invoicing side: raising the invoice, holding the term, drafting the chase.

Knowlix does not publish. It will not post to your channels, edit your video or design a thumbnail. Brainstorming, research and a first draft are what an AI teammate is for, and the finished piece stays yours.

The AI teammate is approval-gated. It prepares, you approve, it runs.

It costs $24.90 per seat per month, reduced from $35.60, with a 7-day free trial, no credit card required and no permanent free plan.

For the stages before the invoice, our sibling article Brand deals from pitch to payment: how to run them without a spreadsheet covers the full deal lifecycle. Weighing this against handing the whole thing to a manager is the subject of What a 15 percent manager commission actually costs you.

What to do Monday morning

Three steps, none of which requires buying anything.

1. List every unpaid invoice with three columns: amount, the exact date it fell due, days past due today. Sort by the third column. The top of that list is the work you are owed.
2. Set a calendar reminder for the due date of every open invoice. From here on, do it in the same minute you send the invoice.
3. Open your last three contracts and find the compensation clause. Write down the payment term, whether the fee is gross or net, and what date the clock starts from. Anything vague is the first thing you fix in the next contract.

Do it with Knowlix

Paste this into your AI teammate, or into any capable assistant, and fill in the brackets.

Act as my accounts receivable lead. I am a creator who invoices brands and
agencies for sponsored content. I have roughly [N] open invoices.

Go through them one at a time and ask me for: the brand, the amount, the
payment term as written in the contract, the date the term started counting,
and the date I sent the invoice.

Then give me one table sorted by days overdue. For the three worst, draft a
follow-up email each: short, addressed to accounts payable, naming the invoice
number, the agreed term and the exact date it fell due, asking for a specific
payment date. Do not send anything. Show me the drafts.

Most creator income that goes missing was invoiced correctly. It stopped being anybody's job on the day it fell due.