Chase overdue invoices

The single recipe that most directly extends your runway. Indian B2B businesses leak 15–30% of receivables to "we forgot to follow up." This is what stops that.

20 minutes, once a week. Wednesday morning is the typical slot.

The scene

You raised an invoice 47 days ago. It's been due for 17. You haven't called. You haven't emailed. You assume the customer will pay "soon." They probably will — but only if reminded, and the longer you wait the more politely-aggressive the reminder needs to be, and you don't have time to write 14 polite-aggressive reminders.

The AR Cleanup Playbook does the drafting. You do the confirming.

The steps

1. Run the AR Cleanup Playbook

In chat:

Run the AR Cleanup Playbook.

(Or Playbook → Templates → AR Cleanup → Run.)

2. The Playbook's first step — show me

The Finance agent lists every overdue invoice, bucketed by age:

Click a bucket to expand. Each invoice has customer, amount, original due date, last reminder sent (if any).

3. Step two — drafts

For each invoice, the Finance agent drafts a reminder. The wording escalates by age bucket:

• 1–7 days: "Just a gentle nudge — invoice #INV-104 was due last Friday."
• 8–30 days: "Hi Rajesh, hoping to close out invoice #INV-104. Let me know if there's anything blocking on your end."
• 31–60 days: "Hi Rajesh, this is now 35 days past due. Can we get a payment date locked in this week?"
• 60+ days: A more formal note, often with a suggestion to escalate to a phone call.

Each draft is in the customer's preferred language (if you've recorded one) and matches the relationship's tone (formal for new customers, warmer for regulars).

4. Step three — review and send

You can:

• Send — goes via email or WhatsApp depending on the customer's preferred channel
• Edit — tweak before sending
• Skip — for customers you've already spoken to or shouldn't be chased (the ones you said "I'll handle this one myself")
• Escalate — for 60+ day overdues, the Playbook offers to mark the customer for a personal call from you

Each reminder is a separate confirmation. No bulk-send button. This is deliberate — one badly-worded reminder to a real customer is more expensive than five minutes of clicking.

5. Step four — record what comes back

When a customer replies (via email or WhatsApp), the reply lands in the invoice's history. You don't have to manually mark anything — when the payment comes through, the invoice auto-marks as paid (via the gateway reconciliation).

If the customer says "we'll pay next Friday" in their reply, mark that as a promised date. The Playbook will check in on Friday if payment hasn't landed.

The gotchas

Don't escalate too fast

A 10-day-overdue invoice doesn't need a formal "this is now past due" message. The age-bucketed drafts get the tone right. If you manually escalate sooner, you risk the customer relationship for a small win.

The Finance agent's draft for 1–7 days overdue is intentionally friendly. Trust it.

Don't auto-send

Even for the well-behaved customers you've nudged 50 times. There's no scheduled-auto-send option in the Playbook by design. The 30 seconds of human review per draft prevents a lot of damage.

Mark "paid" promptly

When a customer says "we paid" via reply or WhatsApp, the gateway might not have confirmed yet (3-7 day settlement for some methods). If you're sure they paid, mark Promised. The Playbook stops sending reminders. When the gateway confirms, it auto-marks Paid.

"Why is this customer not in the list?"

If a customer doesn't appear in the overdue list and you think they should:

• Check the invoice date — maybe it isn't actually overdue yet
• Check the payment terms — Net-45 means it's not overdue until day 46
• Check whether the invoice was marked paid by mistake

The Finance agent uses your invoice records, not your gut. If your gut is right and the invoice is wrong, fix the invoice.

What you'll feel after a quarter

Three numbers that move:

1. Days-Sales-Outstanding (DSO) drops. Most workspaces see 8–12 days of DSO reduction within 60 days of starting this Playbook weekly.
2. Bad debt write-offs shrink. Old invoices that would have been quietly forgotten get either paid or formally written off — both better than "we're not sure."
3. Runway extends. Each ₹5L of receivables converted to cash is a ~0.3-month runway extension at typical SME burn rates. That math compounds.

What's next

• Check your runway honestly — the recipient of the runway extension
• Prep for GST filing — clean invoice ledger makes GST filing easy
• Reference → Invoicing — invoice settings, payment links, dispute handling