The hidden hours behind late payments — Editorial Intelligence

Signal note — the full article is published on Sage: The hidden hours behind late payments.

The Hidden Hours research identified late payments as a source of operational pressure on accounting firms. This article puts a number on it: business owners spend an average of 86 hours a year chasing unpaid invoices. Across the economy, that adds up to 133 million hours of staff time lost every year — generating nothing except money businesses were already owed.

That figure reframes the late payment debate. Most of the policy conversation centres on cash flow — when money arrives, whether it arrives at all, what the shortfall costs. The 86-hour figure introduces a different dimension: the cost is not only financial. It is temporal. And time lost to chasing payment is time not spent on the work that generates new payment.

The article’s most useful analytical move is distinguishing the financial cost from the operational cost.

The financial cost is visible and measurable: £26 billion in outstanding late payments at any given time. The operational cost is less visible — it accumulates in follow-up emails, system checks, client queries, reminder sequences. Every delayed payment creates a queue of tasks. Every task costs time. The 86 hours is the annual total of that queue, per business owner.

This is the same pattern Hidden Hours identified in accounting firms. The total cost is rarely one large visible thing. It is dozens of small things — each reasonable in isolation, each adding a few minutes, collectively consuming hours that were never budgeted for and were never named as a cost.

The accountant sits at the centre of this in two directions.

As a business themselves, accounting firms carry their own late payment exposure. But more significantly, they absorb it on behalf of clients. A delayed payment affects cash flow. Cash flow affects decisions. Decisions affect forecasting, hiring, investment. Each consequence becomes a client query. Each query becomes an advisory conversation. Each advisory conversation is work that sits outside the formal engagement — and according to the Hidden Hours research, 81% of firms regularly perform exactly this kind of work without charging for it.

Small Business Commissioner Emma Jones and AAT President Lucy Cohen were both explicit at Accountex 2026 that the profession is already carrying this load. Jones’s framing: accountants are the first call when new legislation lands. Cohen’s: when the late payer is your largest client, the theory of what businesses should do runs into the harder reality of what they actually can.

The proposed UK reforms — a 60-day payment cap, mandatory interest at 8% above base rate, stronger enforcement powers for the Small Business Commissioner — matter because they change the nature of the conversation between supplier and client.

The accountant’s advisory role in this shifts from navigating an ambiguous negotiation to explaining a legal framework. That is a cleaner, more bounded brief. And the certainty matters operationally: if the maximum is 60 days, that is what you model. You are not sensitivity-testing out to 90 or 120.

Cohen made the practitioner version of this point: clear maximum terms remove the awkwardness from the relationship. The constraint moves from the relationship to the rules.

The deeper signal here is the same one running through the Accountex analysis.

Late payments, MTD, AI adoption, compliance requirements — these are not separate issues. They are symptoms of the same structural shift: work is becoming more continuous. Processes that ran in cycles are now running continuously. Visibility has increased. Responsibility has expanded to match what is now visible.

The 86 hours a year spent chasing payment are hidden hours in exactly the sense the research describes — work that is real, that costs time and attention, that sits outside formal scope, and that is rarely charged for because it has never been given a name. The late payment legislation may reduce that figure. The operating model pressure that created it will not disappear when the invoices start arriving on time.