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If you invoice at the end of a project, you have already given away your leverage.
By delivery the hours are spent and the client has seen the work. Nothing on your side is still owed, so nothing on your side still creates urgency. Eleven week payment cycles are almost never a client problem — they are a structure problem, decided months earlier.
Three things that changed our cash flow, none of them adversarial:
→ Split into three. Deposit at signature, milestone at first presentation, balance at delivery. Nothing starts before the deposit clears.
→ Make every trigger observable. "On client approval" is a permission slip the client can decline to sign for months. "On presentation of three directions" either happened or it did not.
→ Never tie the final payment to a launch date. Campaigns slip. Use "thirty days after final delivery, launch or no launch".
Write all of it during scoping, in the same document, while the relationship is warm and nobody is negotiating it line by line.
Full breakdown, including how we price the licence as a separate line: https://supadark.com/notes/invoicing-a-sonic-branding-project
supadark.com
How to Invoice a Sonic Branding Project Without Chasing the Payment
Deposit, milestone, balance. How to structure payment on a sonic branding engagement so the invoice is a schedule you designed at scoping, not a request you send at the end.
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📩 Collaborate with Us? Contra Cansaas Agency
Formation moved fast.
One discovery call.
One rough idea.
80% of the core product mapped out before we hung up.
Why?
Because we’d lived the problem ourselves.
Car documents everywhere. Service history scattered. Warranty in PDFs. Repair invoices missing when you actually need them.
So we didn’t have to imagine the pain. We already knew it.
We designed the product, built the iOS app, started using it ourselves, and it ended up saving us money too.
Here’s a look at Formation’s onboarding + documents flow
Full case-study - https://designseason.co/formation-casestudy
