The client who never sends receipts

First, work out which client you have

There are four reasons a client does not send receipts, and they need four different responses. Sending a firmer email to a client with the third problem will not work no matter how well you word it.

If you cannot tell which one you have, assume busy for the first cycle and see whether the sequence below fixes it. It fixes most of them.

Day 0: the request that does not need chasing

Most chasing is caused by the original request rather than the client. A request that names the items, names the deadline, and states what happens if the deadline passes gets answered at a rate that makes the rest of this article unnecessary. The full argument for that is in how to ask a client for bank statements, and it applies identically to receipts.

Three things specific to receipts:

• Ask for the ones you actually need, not all of them. If you can see the transaction on a statement and the supplier is obvious, you often do not need the receipt at all — it depends on your jurisdiction, the amount, and whether the client reclaims sales tax on it. A list of eleven specific missing items gets a better response than “please send this month’s receipts”, because it is visibly finite.
• Name the transaction, not the document. “£412.60, 14 August, TOOLSTATION” is something the client can find. “Outstanding purchase receipts” is a research project.
• Accept a photo. Receipts are the one place where a phone photo is genuinely fine in most jurisdictions, and refusing them costs you more in delay than the tidiness is worth. Say so explicitly in the request — a lot of clients assume you want the paper.

Day 3: the nudge

Short, friendly, no new information, no guilt. At day three the client has not decided to ignore you — the email has simply moved down the screen.

Hi [Name],

Quick nudge on these — still 11 items outstanding for [Month]:

[list, or: they are all on the link below]

Photos from your phone are fine, no need for the paper.

Upload here: [link]

[Your name]

Reply to the original thread rather than starting a new one, so the client can see the original detail without hunting for it. And keep it genuinely short: a long day-three email reads as a complaint, which puts a busy client on the defensive when they have not actually done anything wrong yet.

Day 7: name the consequence

At a week, the email needs to carry information the earlier ones did not. That information is what happens next — stated as fact, not as a threat.

Hi [Name],

Still 11 receipts outstanding for [Month]. I want to be clear about what happens if they do not arrive, because it affects you rather than me:

- Without the receipt I cannot claim the [VAT / GST / input tax] on those items. On this month's list that is roughly [£X] you would otherwise get back.
- Anything unsupported gets posted to a holding account and shows in your accounts as unexplained, which is exactly what gets looked at if you are ever reviewed.
- Your [Month] figures are due out on [date]. Missing items push that back.

I need them by [date] to include them in this month's return.

If digging out receipts every month is not realistic — and for a lot of people it genuinely is not — say so and we will change how this works rather than repeating it. There are options.

Upload here: [link]

[Your name]

The number matters. “Roughly £340 you would otherwise get back” is a different email from “we cannot reclaim the tax”. You are converting an administrative chore into a figure, which is the only currency this client reliably responds to.

The last paragraph is deliberate. It gives the client an exit that is not failure, and it is the sentence that most often produces an honest reply — usually some version of “I know, I am terrible at this”, which is the opening you need for the structural fix further down.

Day 14: change who is doing the work

Two weeks of silence means the current approach has failed. Sending a fourth version of the same email is the point at which you are wasting your own time on purpose. Change the method instead.

1. Pick up the phone. Not a call to chase — a call to ask what is getting in the way. This is where you find out that they changed accountants mid-year, or that the receipts are in a shoebox in a van, or that they have been embarrassed about a couple of personal purchases since June. None of that ever arrives by email.
2. Offer to do it with them, once. Fifteen minutes on a screen share, going through the eleven items. It costs you a quarter of an hour and it very often ends the problem permanently, because most of the resistance is not knowing where to start.
3. Escalate inside the business. If your contact is an office manager and the receipts belong to an owner who never sees your emails, you have been chasing the wrong person for a fortnight. Ask directly who holds them.

At close, when it still has not arrived

You have a close to run and eleven unsupported transactions. Close anyway, and make the gap visible rather than absorbing it.

• Post them somewhere obvious. A suspense or unsupported-expenses account rather than a best guess at a category. A guess disappears and stops being anyone’s problem; a balance in a holding account is a question that gets asked again next month.
• Do not claim the input tax on unsupported items. Claim it when the receipt arrives, in the period it arrives. Your rules will vary by jurisdiction — follow yours, but do not let a missing document quietly become a claimed one.
• Report the gap in writing, in the same email as the accounts. One paragraph, every month, listing what is unsupported and what it is costing. Repetition in a document the client actually opens does more than any chaser you will ever write.
• Keep the record. If it ever becomes a dispute about whether the books are right, the trail of specific, dated requests is the thing that protects you.

One thing to flag on [Month]: 11 transactions totalling [£X] are in the accounts without supporting receipts. They are sitting in [holding account] and I have not claimed the [VAT / GST] on them, which is about [£Y].

The list is attached. If you can find any of them I will move them into the correct categories and pick up the tax on next month's return. Anything still unsupported at year end will need to be dealt with then, and it is harder at that point rather than easier.

When the answer stops being a better email

If the same client is on this sequence three months running, the problem is not the wording and no template is going to fix it. At that point there are only three real options, and it is worth being honest with yourself about which one you are choosing.

Option 1: remove the client from the loop entirely

Receipts that never touch the client are receipts that never need chasing. Supplier invoices sent directly to a dedicated address, receipt-capture apps with automatic forwarding from the supplier, statements pulled directly from the account. Every item you move out of the client’s hands is one you delete from the monthly chase forever. This is the highest-leverage fix available and it is worth an hour of setup per client.

Option 2: make the remaining ask trivially small and automatic

What is left after option 1 is usually a handful of items a month. Those should arrive through a standing request that goes out on its own schedule, tracks what has come in, and chases the rest without you writing anything. If you are still composing the chaser by hand, you are doing a machine’s job at your own hourly rate.

Option 3: price the chasing, or stop doing it

Some clients will never send receipts. That is a fact about them, not a failure of your process. What you can control is whether you are doing that work for free.

The repricing conversation

Harder than any of the emails above, and the one that actually solves the fourth client type. The framing that works is not “you are difficult so I am charging you more”. It is “here is what this specific thing costs, and here are your options”.

I want to raise something about how your bookkeeping runs, and it is a practical point rather than a complaint.

Most of the time on your account does not go on the bookkeeping — it goes on collecting the paperwork. Last month that was [X] separate follow-ups before I had what I needed to close.

Two ways forward, and either is fine with me:

1. We change the process so the paperwork comes to me directly instead of through you. Supplier invoices to a dedicated address, receipts captured on your phone as you spend, the standing monthly list going out automatically. Setup takes about an hour of your time, once, and then this mostly stops being something you think about.

2. We leave it as it is and I bill the collection work separately, at [£X] a month, because right now it is inside a fee that was quoted for the bookkeeping.

I would rather do the first one. But I would rather have this conversation than keep sending you reminder emails neither of us enjoys.

Most clients take option one, which is the outcome you wanted. The ones who take option two are paying you for the work you were already doing. Either way the conversation ends, which the emails never do.

Preventing it on the next client

Everything above is remedial. The cheap version is setting the expectation at onboarding, in writing, before there is anything to chase — what you need, when, how it arrives, and what happens if it does not. The new client document checklist covers the whole day-one list; the receipts part of it takes two sentences and saves you a year of chasers.

For the mechanics: ClientVault exists to be the standing request in option two above. You set the item list once — one line per thing you need, your instruction attached to each — set it to repeat monthly or quarterly, and it sends itself. The client opens one link with no account and no password, and can put as many files against one item as they like, so “August receipts” is a single line rather than eleven. Reminders for whatever is still outstanding go automatically at day 3, day 7 and day 14, which is the sequence at the top of this page running without you writing any of it.

It is free for three clients with no card, which is enough to try it on the one client this article is about. It is new and it is built by one person — the Content Snare comparison and the FileInvite comparison both say plainly where the alternatives are stronger, including certifications we do not hold.