The list you keep meaning to get to
Every week you look at aged debtors and see the same names. You tell yourself you will send a few emails on Thursday. Thursday fills up. By the time you do write, the invoice is two months old and the email has to be firmer than you would like, with a customer you want to keep.
In many small businesses chasing is done by the owner or by whoever is least busy that day, which means it is done in bursts and inconsistently. Some customers get three reminders, others none.
Why it keeps slipping
The problem is rarely that nobody knows how to write a reminder. It is that chasing has no owner and no trigger. It depends on someone noticing and choosing to do an unpleasant task, and that is exactly the kind of task that gets pushed back.
Built-in reminder features in accounting software help, but they tend to be all or nothing. They send the same message to your biggest customer and your newest, they keep going when the customer has already replied saying the invoice is disputed, and they have no idea that you agreed a payment plan on the phone last week. So people switch them off.
The cost of not chasing
| What happens | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Invoices age quietly | Older debts are harder to collect and more likely to be written off |
| Disputes surface late | A wrong invoice discovered after sixty days is harder to fix |
| Cash sits with customers | You borrow or delay your own payments to cover the gap |
| Chasing happens in anger | Relationships suffer because the message comes too late and too sharp |
Late disputes are the underrated one. Often the reason an invoice has not been paid is that something is wrong with it: missing PO number, wrong address, disputed quantity. Early polite contact finds that out while it is still easy to fix.
How we automate the chasing
- Read open invoices, due dates and customer contacts from Xero or QuickBooks through the API, refreshed daily.
- Apply a sequence you design: a friendly note before the due date, a reminder after, a firmer message later, then a handover to a person. Different customer groups can have different sequences.
- Write each message with the specifics filled in: invoice number, amount, original date, a copy of the invoice and a payment link through Stripe or GoCardless if you use one.
- Watch the replies. When a customer responds, the sequence pauses and the reply is classified: promise to pay, query, dispute, remittance, out of office. Disputes and queries go straight to a person.
- Record promises to pay with a date, and check the bank feed for the payment before sending anything further.
- Give the person who owns credit control a single view: who is in which stage, what was said, and who needs a phone call today.
The wording stays yours. We draft the templates with you, and if you want AI-written variations to avoid sounding robotic, a person approves the templates rather than the model improvising per customer.
What changes
Reminders go out on time whether or not anyone remembers. The awkward first nudge happens automatically and early, which means the conversations you do have in person are fewer and calmer. Disputes come to light while the job is still fresh.
You also get an honest picture of who pays late habitually, which is useful when you set payment terms for the next job.
The person who owns credit control, whether that is you or someone in the office, starts each morning with a short list: the promises that fell due yesterday and were not kept, the disputes waiting for an answer, and the two or three accounts where a phone call would help. Everything else is already moving along without them.
Because every message and reply is logged against the invoice, handing credit control to someone else, or covering a holiday, no longer means reading through a colleague's sent folder to work out where things stand.
Is this you?
- Chasing happens when someone remembers, not on a schedule.
- You switched off your accounting software's reminders because they annoyed good customers.
- Disputes about invoices come up weeks after the due date.
- The owner ends up making the difficult calls.
- You cannot quickly see who has promised to pay and when.