Billing & collections
Invoices out on time. Chasers that don’t grate.
Billing is where small businesses leak cash quietly. A late invoice is a loan to the customer; a shy chaser is a gift to the customer. We design a billing cadence that is disciplined but not adversarial — invoices out within a day of the work, reminders that read like a colleague rather than a collection agency, and a reconciliation process that doesn’t eat your Friday.
How it shows up
Signs the work is needed.
- 01 Friday afternoons eaten by reconciliation and chaser emails nobody wants to send.
- 02 Late payers staying late payers because nobody has had time to ask them, again, for the fourth time, politely.
- 03 Invoices going out five, ten, thirty days after the work is completed — sometimes because nobody was sure the work was actually "done".
- 04 A chase email that sounded businesslike at 9am and reads hostile at 3pm on the second round.
- 05 A handful of ghosts on the aged debtors report that everyone is too embarrassed to mention.
How we design it
The shape of the setup.
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a.
We trigger invoicing off the work, not the calendar.
The moment a milestone is reached — project delivered, retainer month closed, service rendered — the invoice drafts itself in Xero or QuickBooks, pre-populated with the right line items, awaiting a single review-and-send from you. No more "we meant to invoice that three weeks ago" conversations.
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b.
We write the chaser sequence once.
Three chaser templates — day 3, day 10, day 21 past due — written in your voice, each one slightly firmer than the last, none of them rude. Sent automatically. When a payment lands, the sequence stops for that invoice. You never accidentally chase someone who has already paid.
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c.
We automate the reconciliation.
Bank transactions matched to invoices on arrival. Stripe, GoCardless, Wise, and your business account all feeding a single view. The 90% of reconciliations that don’t need a human no longer get one; the 10% that need judgement surface clearly so you can handle them in ten minutes a week, not a day.
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d.
We put a number on the wall.
A weekly cashflow summary — invoiced, collected, outstanding, DSO — sent to the owner’s inbox on Monday morning. Three numbers, one line each. The first time you read it you will be surprised by at least one. The numbers get better once they are looked at regularly.
What “done” looks like
Outcomes we hold ourselves to.
These are the benchmarks we aim for on a typical engagement. Your specifics will vary — the diagnosis document names the ones that apply to your business, in writing, before work starts.
- Invoices sent within 24 hours of milestone
- No gap between delivery and invoice. Cashflow improves because invoicing becomes a reflex rather than an afterthought.
- DSO reduced by 20–40%
- Across most engagements we see days-sales-outstanding drop noticeably within a quarter, purely by making invoicing and chasing prompt and polite.
- Zero manual bank reconciliation
- Bank transactions and invoices reconcile themselves by default; humans only touch the exceptions.
- A weekly cashflow reality-check
- Three numbers every Monday. The owner is never surprised by the monthly accounts again.
A representative engagement
What an average client looks like.
The context
A twelve-person UK production company with long projects (three to six months) and milestone billing. Invoices were often sent weeks late because the team had to confirm internally that the milestone was "really" done. DSO was creeping toward 60 days, and the finance lead was leaving on a Friday night feeling sour.
What we built
- A lightweight milestone-sign-off form in Airtable. Producer ticks "milestone complete", a draft invoice lands in Xero within five minutes, pre-filled with client, line items, and VAT.
- Three-stage chaser sequence in n8n, using the company’s own email voice, pausing automatically when Xero marks an invoice paid.
- A daily bank-feed reconciliation via the Xero bank-feed API plus a Stripe webhook — matched invoices close themselves.
- Monday cashflow email at 07:00 to the owner and finance lead: invoiced (weekly), collected (weekly), outstanding (current), DSO (trailing 90).
Six months on
DSO fell from 58 to 34 days over three months. Finance-lead Friday hours down from four to under one. Chasers stopped being a source of internal friction because they no longer required someone to write them at the time.
This is a composite drawn from the pattern we see most commonly in this area of work. The shape holds; the specifics change.
When this isn’t the right fit
Times we say no.
- You bill by the hour, with a complex time-tracking input that varies widely between clients. Clean automation requires clean sources; fix the time-tracking first.
- You work in industries where billing is contractually entangled with multi-party sign-offs (construction progress payments, for example). The automation is possible but the work is largely legal, not operational.
- Your payments cycle is already tight (DSO under 15 days) and everyone on your team is comfortable with the current process. The gain would not justify the setup.
- Most of your revenue is consumer-facing card transactions. This service is designed for B2B invoice billing; consumer card-based businesses have a different shape.
If this describes the shape of your week, write to us.
Book a discovery call