Automated invoice follow-up and accounts receivable automation in Australia

1. One job title, three jobs nobody wants

Advertise for an accounts receivable officer and you are advertising for three distinct kinds of work. The same is true when the job has no title at all and lands on the owner of a trade business at nine at night. There is chasing: someone has to ask for money that is already earned. There is credit control: deciding who gets terms, how much, and when to stop supplying. And there is allocation: matching the payments that arrive against the invoices they were meant for, and reconciling the statements that follow.

These fail differently. Chasing fails because nobody wants to do it, so it gets deferred to Friday and then not done. Credit control fails because it happens too late: the risk was visible before the order was accepted and nobody was watching. Allocation fails silently, in the form of a month-end that takes two days instead of two hours.

Automating them as one thing is the usual mistake. They want different treatments, in a particular order, and the order is not the one most businesses pick.

2. Xero already emails reminders. Here is where it stops.

If your invoices live in Xero, the first step of automated invoice follow-up is already in the box, and it is worth switching on before you buy anything. According to Xero’s own help pages, its invoice reminders:

• Email customers when an invoice is due or overdue. Turning them on gives you three default reminders, which you can edit, delete or add to, up to five in all.
• Can go before the due date as well as after it, set as a number of days either side.
• Only go out on invoices marked as sent, and only to customers with a current email address on their contact.
• Can skip invoices owing less than an amount you choose, and can be switched off for one customer or one invoice, such as a partly paid one or one you have already talked about.
• Send customer replies to the person who turned reminders on, unless you change the address.
• Go out once a day, between 4am and 8am in your organisation’s time zone.

Turning them on is a checkbox under Sales settings. If you are chasing by hand and that box is clear, start there tonight.

Where they stop is the point of the rest of this paper. Every item on that list is an email on a timer, and a reminder email is a note on the fridge: useful, and easy to walk past. Nothing in Xero’s reminder settings rings the customer, hears “I’ll pay Friday” and holds them to the date, notices that a reply was really a dispute, decides who gets credit on the next job, or reads a remittance and splits a lump payment across invoices. Xero’s own setup page points you to the Xero App Store for apps with “more advanced invoice reminder options”.

3. The overdue invoice nobody rang about

An emailed reminder asks the customer to do something later. It lands in the same inbox as everything else and gets archived unread. The one thing that reliably moves an invoice is somebody asking directly, and that is the thing nobody in the business wants to do.

So automated invoice follow-up is not “send more reminders”. It is a sequence with escalating contact types, where each step is triggered by the ledger rather than by anyone remembering: a reminder before the due date, a firmer one after it, then a call. The call reads the live balance at dial time, states the specific invoice, sends a payment link mid-conversation if the customer agrees, and records a promise-to-pay with a date if they do not pay on the spot.

The thing that makes it work is coverage rather than persuasion. Most debtors pay when someone asks; the problem is that nobody has the hours to ask all of them, so the calls that happen go to the largest balances and everything under a few thousand dollars ages out unattended.

4. Deciding who gets credit before the job, not after

Chasing is what you do after the decision. Credit control is the decision, and it is where the cheaper wins are, because a debt you never took on costs nothing to collect.

In most small businesses credit control is not a process, it is a memory: somebody knows that a particular customer is slow, and sometimes mentions it. Automating it means writing that knowledge down as rules the ledger can act on.

None of this needs a model to be clever. It needs the rules to exist and something to enforce them on every order rather than on the ones somebody happens to look at.

5. Which invoice was that payment for?

This is the invisible third of the job: statement and remittance reconciliation. Payments arrive as a lump sum with a reference that means something only to the customer. A remittance advice turns up separately, as a PDF, an email body, or a spreadsheet, listing which invoices the lump was meant to cover. Somebody reads one and types the other.

Automating it is document work, and it is the same shape as invoice capture on the payables side: read the remittance, extract the invoice numbers and amounts, and allocate the receipt across them. The interesting cases are the ones that do not add up (a short payment, a deduction nobody explained, a credit note applied without warning), and those go to a person as a short exception list instead of as a bank statement to reverse-engineer.

Customer statements are the other half. Sending them is trivially automatable and most businesses still do it by hand or not at all, which matters more than it sounds: a statement is often what surfaces the invoice the customer genuinely never received, and it costs nothing to send on a schedule.

6. What changes when follow-up runs itself

7. Automated invoice follow-up, start to finish

1. 1New customer onboarded with ABN, GST and trading checks, and a credit limit recorded
2. 2Order checked against the limit and the current balance before it is accepted
3. 3Invoice issued from the ledger, with the customer's terms applied
4. 4Reminder sent before the due date, and again after it, triggered by the ledger
5. 5Overdue accounts prioritised by age, amount and contact history
6. 6Call placed against live balances, with a payment link sent mid-conversation
7. 7Promise-to-pay captured with a date, or dispute detail recorded for a person
8. 8Incoming payments matched to remittance advices and allocated across invoices
9. 9Short payments and unexplained deductions raised as an exception list
10. 10Risk score updated from behaviour; terms stepped down or a stop-supply proposed

8. What still needs you

Receivables touches customers you want to keep, so the boundary matters more here than almost anywhere else in a back office.

9. Where the money comes back

Illustrative directions, not measured results. Your numbers will differ: the point is which levers move.

The largest single gain is usually not the invoices you eventually recover. It is the ones you recover weeks earlier, and the bad debt you never took on because the limit was checked when the order came in.

10. Where to start this week

1. 1

   Switch on what you already have

   If you use Xero and its invoice reminders are off, turn them on and make sure your invoices are marked as sent. It is a checkbox, and everything below builds on it.

2. 2

   Get your baseline

   Average debtor days, total overdue, the ageing distribution, and how much cash is sitting unallocated. The last number is usually the surprise.

3. 3

   Fix allocation first

   Counter-intuitive, but chasing runs on the ageing report. If receipts are not allocated, you will ring people who have already paid, and once is enough to lose trust in the whole thing.

4. 4

   Clean the contact data

   Voice chasing is only as good as your phone numbers. Wrong numbers are a common cause of poor contact rates.

5. 5

   Write the credit policy down

   Limits, terms, what triggers a step-down, what triggers a proposed stop-supply, what an agent may agree to unaided. This is the product decision and it is yours.

6. 6

   Start with one ageing bucket

   Run the 30 to 60 day band first. Recent enough that goodwill is intact, overdue enough that a call is clearly warranted.