UGC invoice generator

What to put on an invoice to a brand

An invoice to a brand is a finance document, not a message to your contact. Somebody in accounts payable who has never seen your work has to read it, match it to an approved budget, and release the money. Everything on the page should make that job easy. That means your legal or business name and address, the brand's company name and billing address, a unique invoice number, the date you issued it, the date it falls due, the payment terms in words, a clear list of what you are charging for, the total, how to pay you, and your tax ID or a reference to the W-9 you sent.

Two details get left off most often, and both cost time. The first is the purchase order number. Larger brands raise a PO before the work starts, and their system will not match an invoice that does not carry it. Ask whether there is one before you invoice. The second is the billing email. Your contact in marketing is not the person who pays you, and an invoice sitting in their inbox is an invoice nobody is processing. Send it to accounts payable and copy your contact so they know it has gone in.

Why usage rights belong on their own line

It is tempting to quote one number for the whole job. Do not. Split the content fee from the licence. The content fee pays for making the thing. The licence pays for what the brand may do with it, where, and for how long. Those are separate products, and folding them together hides the one that grows.

Separating them does three useful things. It shows the brand what it is buying, so a request to run the asset in paid media next quarter becomes a new line rather than an argument about what was already covered. It gives the brand a way to reduce the price by taking less rather than paying you less for the same thing. And it leaves a written record of when the licence ends, which matters when you find the same video still running a year later. Write the term into the line itself: organic use on brand owned channels, six months, is a sentence a finance team and a lawyer can both read.

What net 30 really means for your cash flow

Net 30 does not mean you get paid thirty days after you finish the work. It means thirty days after the invoice is accepted, and acceptance usually waits on approval of the content, which can take its own week or two. Then many brands run payments on a fixed cycle, so an invoice that misses the run waits for the next one. A job delivered in early March can reasonably settle in late April. That is not a brand behaving badly, it is how the plumbing works.

You can shorten it. Invoice the day the deliverable is approved rather than at the end of the month. Ask for a deposit on larger jobs, commonly half up front, and bill the rest on delivery. Agree the terms before you shoot, and write them on the invoice itself. A late fee of a percent or two per month, stated up front, is normal in business and gives you something concrete to reference if the invoice drifts.

When an invoice goes unpaid

Wait a few days past the due date, then send a short factual reminder with the invoice attached again and the invoice number in the subject line. No apology, no long explanation. Most late invoices are not disputes, they are a document that fell out of somebody's queue, and a reminder puts it back in.

If a second reminder goes nowhere, ask your contact to chase it internally. They want you to be paid, and a message from inside the company moves faster than one from outside. Keep every email, the signed agreement or the thread where the scope was agreed, and the delivery confirmation. If it goes past sixty days with no answer, say plainly that further work is on hold until the outstanding invoice clears. That sentence, sent calmly, resolves more unpaid invoices than any amount of chasing.

The thing that makes all of this easier is keeping the rate, the rights window and the invoice on the same record, so when you need to point at what was agreed, it is one place rather than four inboxes.