Late Payment Cost Calculator

Put a number on what slow-paying clients cost your studio every year.

Why this exists. Slow payment is one of the most consistent complaints in practice, and there is no free tool that quantifies it for a design studio.

Region

United States, Canada and UK

Annual fee revenue

Average days to get paid (days)Industry reports range from about 49 to 81 days.

Days you would like to get paid in (days)

Your cost of money (%)Overdraft or borrowing rate, or what the cash would earn elsewhere.

Share of invoices never collected (%)

Hours a month spent chasing payment (hrs)

Cost per hour of the person chasing

Everything here is calculated in your browser. Your numbers are never sent anywhere, stored or seen by us.

Annual cost of getting paid late$26,315Financing, write-offs and the time spent chasing.

Cash permanently tied up in unpaid invoices: $123,288
Cost of financing that: $14,795
Invoices never collected: $9,000
Cost of the time spent chasing72 hours a year: $2,520
Cash released by hitting your target: $49,315
Annual saving from that: $5,918

You are carrying your clients for two months. That is a loan they did not ask you for and are not paying interest on.

Getting paid 30 days sooner would release $49,315 of cash permanently, not once.

How this is calculated

Cash tied up is calculated as average daily revenue multiplied by days outstanding. It is a permanent working capital requirement, not a one-off.
Write-offs are treated as a straight loss of fee. If you recover some through legal action, reduce the percentage accordingly.

This is a planning estimate, not professional advice. Read the full disclaimer.

Chasing payment is a job nobody in a design studio wants.

Stage invoices and reminders that go out on time, automatically, in your studio's tone. That is part of what ScaleArc automates.

Talk to the founder

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The thinking behind it

Where this number comes from.

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Between seven and ten weeks of completed work sits unpaid at any moment. That is not an admin problem, it is a loan your practice is making to its clients at nought per cent.

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Where an architecture firm’s margin actually leaks

Six places the fee disappears between the proposal and the bank, the published benchmark for each, and the uncomfortable finding that the two metrics everyone tracks barely predict profit at all.