Invoices chased politely until they are paid
The system watches your ledger and sends well-written reminders on an escalation ladder, so cash arrives without you playing debt collector.
The problem
How it works by hand
Late payment is a chronic problem for UK small businesses, and the fix is a chasing email nobody wants to write. So it gets put off, the invoice ages another fortnight, and the eventual email is either too soft to work or too sharp for a client you want to keep. Meanwhile you are the one financing their cash flow.
A worked example
What a working version looks like
The system polls your accounting software daily and builds a live list of every invoice past its terms. Each overdue invoice enters an escalation ladder: a friendly nudge at a few days over, a firmer note with the invoice reattached, then a final-notice email referencing your payment terms. Every message is drafted in your tone from templates you approved once, personalised with the invoice details, and sent from your own address so it reads as you, not a robot. A payment or a reply pulls the invoice off the ladder immediately. Anything sensitive, a dispute, a big account, a sob story, gets flagged to a human instead of escalated automatically.
The exact tools change per business. The shape does not.
What it needs
Honest inputs, nothing exotic
- 01Your accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent or Sage)
- 02Your payment terms and how firm you are willing to get at each stage
- 03An email address the reminders send from, ideally yours
- 04A short list of accounts that should never be chased automatically
The payoff
What you get back
Invoices stop ageing in silence. Every overdue account gets chased on schedule, in your voice, without anyone dreading the task or forgetting it, and the awkward conversations are the only ones that still reach a human.
Do it yourself
How you would build this yourself
No course, no upsell. This is the order we would build it in, with the tools named, and a prompt to start from.
- 1
Write the three chasing emails once: friendly nudge, firmer follow-up, final notice referencing your terms. This is the hard part and it is twenty minutes of work.
- 2
Pull the aged receivables report from Xero or QuickBooks every Monday and send the right rung of the ladder to each overdue account, by hand, for a fortnight. You will learn which accounts need careful handling.
- 3
Then automate the pull: Xero and QuickBooks both have APIs, and Zapier or Make can fetch overdue invoices on a schedule without code.
- 4
Have Claude merge each invoice’s details into your templates and queue the results as drafts in Gmail or Outlook. Send from your own address, never a noreply.
- 5
Keep a do-not-chase list and check it before anything goes. One automated nudge to the wrong client costs more than a month of late payment.
I want to automate invoice chasing. I use [Xero or QuickBooks]. Build me a script that runs daily, pulls every invoice past its due date via the API, and drafts a reminder email for each using my three templates (pasted below), picking the template by how overdue it is. Drafts go into my Gmail drafts folder for me to approve, nothing auto-sends. Skip any customer on my do-not-chase list. Walk me through getting the API keys first.
Copy it into Claude Code, fill the brackets, and it will plan the build with you before writing a line of code.
We would rather show you how than bill you. The whole ladder of free help, answers, guides and the weekly build-along, is on the do-it-yourself page.