How would invoice billing even reduce the risk of this outcome? Surely any system with more manual and asynchronous steps involved is MORE likely to result in Google erroneously claiming you haven't paid, not less? I don't grasp what the logic behind this suggestion is even meant to be.
Invoices are indefinitely postpaid; there’s no real point at which you can really 100% declare an invoice as having “not been paid.”
That’s why NET30/90/etc exist — without an incentive to pay sooner, invoices will just sit around on the receiver’s books until it’s convenient for them to pay (e.g. to make their financials for a particular quarter look good.)
Invoices under contract law are like PayPal’s arbitration process: “always favours the buyer.” A seller would need an explicit pre-existing contract clause stating a due date for an invoice, in order for a due date declared on an invoice to have any force; by default, it doesn’t. And because invoice billing is something companies tend to offer mostly to companies they’re trying to stay on the good side of, they don’t tend to sit them down for a binding contract negotiation when doing so.
The invoice itself doesn't solve anything, but it requires a "handshake" step where trust is established with the payer, with the result that things don't just turn off automatically when something goes wrong.
