Ifeanyi runs a signage and large-format printing business in Aba. Two staff, one wide-format printer, and a client list of churches, schools and shop owners. Good work, steady demand.
But every month he was broke.
The problem was not his prices. It was that his invoices said nothing about when he expected to be paid. He would deliver a ₦850,000 branding job, hand over an invoice, and then wait. Some clients paid in a week. Some paid in two months. One school paid him in three instalments over 90 days without ever agreeing to that — they just did it, because nothing on the invoice said they could not.
Meanwhile Ifeanyi had already spent ₦420,000 of his own money on vinyl, aluminium and ink for that job.
That gap — money out now, money in whenever — is what payment terms exist to close.
Payment terms are the part of your invoice that answers three questions:
That is it. No legal language required. A payment term can be a single sentence.
Most Nigerian MSME invoices answer question one and skip questions two and three entirely. And an invoice that does not name a date is not really a request for payment — it is a suggestion.
The one-line rule: if a stranger read your invoice, they should know the exact calendar date the money is due without asking you. If they cannot, your terms are too vague.
You do not need to invent anything. There are five patterns, and almost every business fits one of them.
"Net 30" is the one that confuses people most. It simply means the full amount is due 30 days from the invoice date. Net 14 means 14 days. There is no discount, no instalment plan, no negotiation built into it — just a deadline.
Match the term to how much of your own cash the job ties up.
For Ifeanyi, the answer was obvious once he looked at the numbers. His material cost was roughly 50% of every job. So a 50% deposit meant he never again funded a client's materials from his own pocket.
He moved to: 60% deposit, 40% due within 7 days of delivery. The extra 10% covered his labour during production.
Nobody walked away. Two clients asked why, he explained it was now standard for all jobs, and that was the end of it.
Here is what changed most for Ifeanyi: he started putting a real due date on every invoice.
A due date is not decoration. It is the reference point for everything that follows — your follow-up message, your late fee, and if it ever comes to it, your evidence. "You are 23 days past the due date on this invoice" is a conversation. "You have not paid me yet" is a complaint.
In Lucrive, the due date is a required field — you cannot save an invoice without one. That is deliberate. Once the date passes, the invoice moves itself into an Overdue state, and your invoice list shows a running count of how many invoices are past due, plus a filter to view only those.
You also get an email at 7, 14 and 30 days past due for each unpaid invoice. Worth knowing: that reminder comes to you, not to your client. It is a nudge to go and chase, not an automated dunning letter sent in your name. The follow-up message is still yours to write — deliberately, because how you chase a church differs from how you chase a corporate client. There is a full guide to that conversation in how to handle a client who will not pay.
Put your terms in the Notes field on the invoice. That is the field that travels with the document — it is saved to the invoice record, printed on the PDF, shown on the shareable invoice link your client opens, and included in the invoice email. Anything you type there, your client sees.
Copy one of these:
For a deposit arrangement:
Payment terms: 60% deposit (₦510,000) due before production begins. Balance of ₦340,000 due within 7 days of delivery. Production starts on receipt of the deposit.
For a corporate client on Net 30:
Payment terms: Full amount due on or before 7 October 2026 (30 days from invoice date). Please quote invoice number INV-2026-0184 on your transfer.
For payment on delivery:
Payment terms: Payment due in full on delivery. Goods remain the property of the business until payment is received.
For milestones:
Payment terms: ₦400,000 on signing, ₦400,000 at design approval, ₦450,000 on final handover. Each stage begins once the prior payment is confirmed.
Notice what all four have in common: a naira figure, a date or trigger, and no ambiguity. That last line — "quote invoice number on your transfer" — sounds minor and saves hours. Unmatched transfers are one of the most common reasons an MSME owner cannot tell who has actually paid.
Your terms should say what happens after the due date, even if you rarely enforce it. The statement itself is what creates urgency.
Lucrive has a late fee option on the invoice form — either a fixed naira amount or a percentage of the total — which adds the fee to the invoice total. But for most Nigerian MSMEs the more useful move is simply naming the policy in your Notes:
A late payment charge of 5% applies to balances unpaid 14 days after the due date.
On Ifeanyi's ₦850,000 job that is ₦42,500. He has invoked it exactly twice in a year. Both times the client paid the original amount immediately and the fee was quietly dropped. That is the fee working correctly — it is a deadline with teeth, not a revenue line.
Long payment terms have a cost beyond cash flow. If you are VAT-registered, your VAT obligation is generally triggered by the transaction and the invoice — not by the day your client's money finally lands. Give a client 60 days and you can end up remitting VAT on a sale you have not been paid for.
This is a real reason to keep terms short rather than generous. If you are unsure whether you are required to register at all, the ₦100M turnover threshold is explained in the VAT guide for Nigerian MSMEs — and confirm your own position with a qualified tax adviser before you file anything.
"Payment on receipt of invoice." This means nothing enforceable. Receipt by whom, on what date? Replace it with a calendar date.
Different terms for every client. You cannot remember them, so you cannot enforce them. Pick a default and vary it only for a documented reason.
Terms agreed on WhatsApp but absent from the invoice. The invoice is the document that survives staff changes at your client's office. If it is not written there, it did not happen.
Waiting until delivery to mention the deposit. Terms belong in your quote or proforma, before any work begins. By invoice stage you are negotiating from the weaker position.
Ifeanyi's revenue barely moved the year he changed his terms. His bank balance changed completely — because the same money arrived weeks earlier and stopped being other people's working capital.
Payment terms are the cheapest cash-flow fix available to a Nigerian MSME. One sentence, written before the work starts.
Set a due date on every invoice, state your terms where your client will read them, and let the follow-ups run themselves — start free at lucrive.io.
Sources & further reading