Pharmacy paying late? Your rights as a UK locum.

You covered a Saturday at an independent six weeks ago. Eight hours, a 40-minute drive each way, a queue of flu jabs. The money still hasn't arrived. You're fairly sure you sent the invoice. You're less sure whether you sent it to the owner or the branch email, and you don't really want to ring and ask.

Most locums have a version of this story. Pharmacy owners are busy too, invoices from freelancers sit at the bottom of the pile, and asking for money you're owed somehow feels rude. But as a self-employed pharmacist, you're a business, and the law treats you like one.

Why late payment hurts locums more

An employed pharmacist is paid on the same day every month. A locum's income arrives in lumps, from a dozen different payers, on whatever timetable each of them keeps. A couple of slow payers in the same month and your own bills don't wait for them.

It also distorts your picture of your finances. Shifts you've worked but haven't been paid for are easy to forget, both when you're working out what to set aside for Self Assessment and when you're deciding whether you can afford a week off.

When is an invoice actually late?

The Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 covers business-to-business invoices across the UK, and that includes a sole trader locum invoicing a pharmacy.

• If you agreed payment terms, the invoice is due on the date you agreed. Between businesses, terms longer than 60 days only stand if both sides expressly agreed them and they aren't grossly unfair to you.
• If you didn't agree anything, payment is due 30 days after the later of doing the shift and the pharmacy getting your invoice.

That second point is worth noticing. The clock starts when they receive the invoice, so a shift you invoice three weeks late gets paid three weeks late, perfectly legally.

What you can charge when it's late

Once an invoice is overdue, and unless you've agreed a different remedy in your terms, you can claim:

• Statutory interest of 8% a year above the Bank of England base rate, worked out daily from the due date.
• A fixed sum for each late invoice: £40 if it's under £1,000, £70 if it's £1,000 to £9,999.99, and £100 for £10,000 or more.
• Reasonable recovery costs beyond that, if chasing it genuinely cost you more.

For a typical shift, the interest is small. If base rate were 4%, a £232 invoice paid 45 days late would earn about £3.43 in interest. The fixed sum is what makes it bite: £40 on top of a £232 invoice is a real cost to a pharmacy that makes a habit of paying late.

Most locums will never actually charge it, and you may not want to with a pharmacy you like working for. But knowing it's there changes how a reminder reads. "Under the Late Payment Act, I'm entitled to add £40 compensation and interest" is a very different email from "sorry to bother you".

A chasing routine that works

1. Agree terms when you book. "I invoice on the day and my terms are 14 days" takes ten seconds on the phone, and gives you a date to point to later.
2. Invoice the same day. Every day you wait is a day added to when you get paid. Include the shift date, hours, rate, mileage, any expenses, your bank details and the due date.
3. Send it to the person who pays. That's often the owner or a head office, not the branch.
4. Chase on a schedule, not a feeling. A friendly nudge on the due date, a firmer one a week later, and a mention of statutory interest and the fixed sum at two weeks.
5. Know when to escalate. If they still won't pay, a formal letter before action usually does it. After that, there's the small claims process in your nation, which is designed for amounts like these.

The real problem is remembering

None of that is complicated. The trouble is that every step depends on you, at the end of a long day, remembering to do it. Invoice tonight. Check who's paid on Friday. Notice that Kirkgate is now 38 days overdue, not 30. Multiply that by every pharmacy you work at, and it's no wonder invoices slip.

The locums who rarely have to chase aren't more assertive than everyone else. They've taken the remembering out of it. Spreadsheets and invoice templates help, but they still wait for you to open them, type in the shift you already logged in your diary, and keep the paid column up to date.

The admin that actually goes away is the kind that starts by itself. If your diary already knows the shift happened, it can write the invoice. If it knows the invoice went out, it can tell you when it's been too long.