The Wrong Invoice Amount
A free B2-level English story for language learners, readable online in 7 languages, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
A freelancer discovers she has undercharged a client by hundreds of dollars and has to send an awkward correction.
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Fatima finished the invoice late on a Thursday night, tired from a week of back-to-back projects. She sent it off to her client Winston without giving it a second read. It wasn't until the following morning, reviewing her records over coffee, that she noticed the number looked wrong.
She had billed Winston for twelve hours of design work, but the total listed on the invoice reflected only eight. Somewhere between her spreadsheet and the invoice template, two line items had been accidentally deleted. If she let it go uncorrected, she would lose nearly four hundred dollars for work she had already completed.
Her stomach tightened slightly at the thought of raising the issue. Winston had already replied that morning, thanking her for such a "reasonable" bill. Correcting it now felt awkward, almost as though she were asking for more after he had already agreed to pay.
Still, Fatima knew that saying nothing wasn't really an option. The work had been done, and the hours were logged and easy to prove. A freelancer who quietly ate her own mistakes wouldn't stay in business very long. She opened a new email and began typing before she could talk herself out of it.
"Hi Winston, I owe you a correction," she wrote. "The invoice I sent yesterday was generated with two line items missing. It undercharged you for eight of the twelve hours actually logged on the project. I've attached a corrected version below, along with the time log for reference."
Winston replied within the hour, and to her relief, his tone stayed entirely friendly. "Thanks for catching that," he wrote. "I'd rather pay the right amount than have you shortchange yourself over a formatting error."
Fatima exhaled, surprised by how much lighter she felt once the message was sent. She had spent the whole morning assuming the conversation would be more uncomfortable than it turned out to be.
That afternoon, she built a simple checklist into her invoicing process, a habit she had been meaning to start for months. Now a deleted line item would be far harder to miss next time. She saved the corrected invoice, attached her updated payment terms, and moved on to the next project already open on her screen.
