Credit control and collections
Every customer chased on the right day, in the right tone, with the ledger position attached — and never chased for an invoice they have already paid.
What is really going wrong
Most businesses do not have a collections problem. They have a consistency problem that looks like a collections problem.
The chase happens when someone has time for it. It is thorough in a quiet week and absent in a busy one. Two people chase the same customer because neither knows the other did. A customer gets a firm letter about an invoice they settled a fortnight ago, which costs more goodwill than the invoice was worth. And the accounts nobody chases at all are, reliably, the ones that age the furthest.
Every one of those is a scheduling and data problem. None of them requires judgement.
What replaces it
- A defined sequence per customer segment — timing, tone, channel and escalation point, agreed once rather than improvised weekly.
- Reconciled against cash received before anything is sent, so a paid invoice is never chased.
- Disputed and on-hold accounts excluded automatically, and visibly, rather than remembered.
- Statements and copy invoices attached to the chase, because the most common reply to a chase is a request for the document.
- Every touch logged against the account, so the escalation decision is made from a record rather than an impression.
- The sequence stops the instant a customer replies, and a person takes it from there.
The control question
Collections carries a control most people do not name: someone senior deciding when an account stops being chased and starts being escalated, put on stop, or provided against. Left informal, that decision drifts — accounts stay in the chase cycle long past the point where anyone believes they will pay, because escalating requires somebody to make a call.
Automating the sequence forces the escalation rule to be written down. That is the quiet benefit: not the emails, but the fact that your business now has a stated position on when a receivable stops being a receivable.
No promises about cash collected. We will not tell you what this does to your debtor days, because we have no audited basis for such a figure and would be making it up. What we will do is show you your own ageing profile and the gaps in your current chase pattern, which is a more useful thing to look at than somebody else’s average.
Common questions
Will automated chasing damage customer relationships?
Badly designed chasing does, and the damage usually comes from getting it wrong rather than from sending it — chasing an invoice already paid, chasing an account in dispute, or chasing a customer twice in a day from two different people. Automation removes those failures, which are the ones customers actually complain about.
Who handles a customer who replies?
A person, always. The automation runs the sequence and stops the moment a human reply arrives, handing over the full ledger position and the history of what was sent. Conversations are not the part being automated.
Can different customers be treated differently?
They should be. A strategic account on ninety-day terms and a small account thirty days overdue warrant different tone, different timing and different escalation. Encoding that is usually the first time a business has stated its collections policy explicitly.
See it against your own process
The quickest way to know whether this is worth doing is to walk one of your own processes through it. That is what the Finance Automation Review is —one week, ending in a ranked build plan.
How the Review worksBook a call
A first call needs nothing prepared and no system access. We reply within one working day.