The European Union decided in 2011 that every freelancer and small business has a legal right to compensation when an invoice goes unpaid. €40 fixed recovery fee per overdue invoice, plus statutory interest at the ECB reference rate plus eight percentage points. Nearly nobody knows this. Of the ones who know, nearly nobody uses it, because the tooling doesn't exist at the freelancer tier.
Enterprise dunning platforms — Bilendo, Upflow, Serrala — charge between €500 and several thousand euros a month to surface this entitlement. Accountants will do it for you at an hourly rate. Templates exist on law firm blogs, but filling one in correctly requires doing the interest math for the exact day count and the exact ECB rate. By the time you've done it, you've earned less than the €40 you're trying to claim.
Every overdue invoice in InvoiceUp now shows a new section in its detail view: the statutory entitlement, with the math done for you. Days late. Interest rate. Accrued interest to today. The €40 fixed recovery fee. The total now owed. All in one block, all in euros, all updated continuously as the invoice ages.
Under that block sits a single button: Send statutory letter. One click sends a formal demand email to the debtor with the full breakdown, a plain reference to Article 2(6) and Article 6 of Directive 2011/7, and a seven-day window before further recovery action. The letter is written in the register that stops conversations — not the register that starts arguments. We only let you send it once per invoice, so you don't accidentally escalate twice.
A law that exists on paper but not in tooling is a law that protects large companies and abandons everyone else. We closed that gap for our users.
For a €3,000 invoice that's sixty days overdue at today's ECB reference rate of 3.50%, the statutory interest is €56.71 per annum pro-rated, plus the €40 recovery fee. The client owes €3,096.71 — €96.71 of it by European law, not by negotiation. A year of moderate late-payment exposure across a typical freelance book is four figures of leakage that nobody invoices for, because nobody does the math.
We do the math, and we keep the ECB reference rate updated on our side so you don't have to track monetary policy to get paid on time. The current snapshot covers Q2 2026; the next review is scheduled for July.
Statutory late-payment compensation is a specific slice of a much larger problem: the compliance floor that enterprise tooling takes for granted and solo businesses pay out of pocket for. Sanctions screening. Subprocessor change monitoring. GDPR request intake. Data-map transparency. Every one of these is the same shape — a law exists, the tooling exists at €10k/year, and the solo user goes without.
We'll keep closing those gaps. Not because compliance is fun — it isn't — but because the gap between what the law gives you and what the market sells you is where Dekimu's whole reason for existing lives.