Catch-Up Fees

Every catch-up fee starts with one number: how many months of backlog you are charging for. Sodium multiplies that by the monthly equivalent of the fee already quoted, so £100 a month for eight months proposes £800. Quarterly, weekly and annual services convert on the same basis — months are the unit whatever the billing frequency.

That figure is a starting point, not a rule. Switch on the override and the fee is yours to set; backlog work is often priced above the ongoing rate because it is harder.

Months are set per service, because backlog is rarely uniform — eight months behind on bookkeeping, fourteen on the accounts. Set them separately, or apply one figure across the whole proposal and adjust the exceptions. Any service that should never carry one can have catch-up fees switched off entirely.

A catch-up fee is a large number arriving at the worst possible moment, right as a client is deciding whether to commit. So it does not have to arrive at once: take it as a single payment, or spread it over up to twelve invoices that ride the client's normal billing dates alongside their recurring fee.

Sodium works out the instalments, dates them against the real billing cycle, and shows the payment plan on the proposal so the client sees exactly what leaves their account and when. Change the frequency or start date later and the unbilled instalments move with it. You choose when the first one lands — on acceptance, or with the first invoice — as a practice default you can override on any one agreement.

This is the line most likely to prompt a phone call, so it gets its own section rather than a cryptic extra row in the pricing table. The client sees what the fee covers, which services it applies to, the period each one spans, the VAT, the total, and the payment plan if you have spread it.

The section is in every practice's proposal template by default, and renders nothing when a proposal has no catch-up fee on it. Like everything in content management, the wording is yours to rewrite. The fee stays a total in its own right rather than being folded into a one-off subtotal, and carries through to the acceptance page in the client portal and the confirmation email.

Where the client is buying a package, the fee is agreed once for the bundle as a whole — one fee against one bundle, which is how the package was sold in the first place. Behind that, Sodium splits it across the services inside in proportion to what each is worth, so the money still lands against the right service in your accounts. Change the make-up of the package and the split follows.

Agreeing the fee is the end of your involvement. On acceptance, every instalment appears on the client's Billing Schedule with its date and description, and is invoiced alongside their recurring fees. No separate invoice to raise, nothing to remember.

Each line says what it is for: the service, the fee, the period covered, and which instalment of how many. Because instalments are ordinary scheduled charges, you can waive the last one, move one or change an amount right up until it is billed. A catch-up fee can also be agreed outside a proposal, straight on a client's service, for the backlog you only discovered later.

The mid-year arrival is the obvious case: a client joining in month eight onto a monthly fee, where the accounts you will file cover four months you were never paid for. Then there is the bookkeeping a year behind, the two years of accounts nobody ever did, the whole book of clients arriving at once when you take over from another practice. Same shape every time — real work in a period before the engagement started, and a fee that has to be explained before it will be paid.

Priced by month against a fee the client has already agreed, written into the proposal they signed, and collected on a schedule they saw in advance, a catch-up fee stops being an awkward conversation and becomes part of the quote.