How an accounting firm automated invoice follow-up

Chasing unpaid invoices is one of those tasks every accounting firm knows intimately, both for their own books and on behalf of the small business clients they advise. It's repetitive, it's awkward, and it eats hours that could go toward actual advisory work. This case study looks at how a real accounting firm tackled it: automating invoice follow-up so it ran consistently in the background instead of consuming staff time every week.

The firm: FHC Accountants and Business Advisors

FHC is a cloud accounting and business advisory firm based in Ireland, working with small and medium-sized clients across agriculture, construction, retail, and professional services. Like most firms in that position, FHC had a dual problem: it needed to manage its own accounts receivable, and it needed a way to help its SME clients deal with the same issue, since late payment is one of the most common threats to a small business's cash flow.

The numbers behind that problem are stark. Research cited in the case study put the average SME's outstanding late payments at roughly £15,370, and found that around 60% of small businesses said they'd be at serious risk of failure if that figure reached $50,000. For FHC's clients, getting invoices paid on time wasn't an administrative nuisance, it was a survival issue.

The challenge: chasing payments without damaging client relationships

One client in particular, a document processing company called Docuflow, illustrates the problem clearly. Docuflow was having trouble getting paid on time, and the manual chasing process, repeated phone calls and follow-up emails, was eating up staff time without reliably getting the money in. Worse, the constant phone calls were straining the relationships with the very customers Docuflow needed to keep.

This is the core tension in invoice follow-up for almost any service business: you need to be persistent enough to actually get paid, but not so aggressive that you damage a relationship you want to keep. Manual chasing tends to fail at exactly this balance, either follow-up is inconsistent because staff are busy with other work, or it becomes the kind of repeated phone call that makes a client feel hounded.

The solution: automated, personalized follow-up sequences

FHC had already automated its own credit control process using Chaser, an accounts receivable automation platform that integrates directly with accounting software like Xero and QuickBooks. After seeing the time savings firsthand, the firm introduced the same tool to Docuflow.

The mechanics of what Chaser automated are fairly straightforward, which is part of why it worked. The platform syncs two-way with the firm's accounting system, so invoice and payment data stays current without anyone re-entering it by hand. From there, it sends reminder emails automatically on a pre-set schedule, building a payment history for each customer so the firm can see who pays reliably and who's at risk of falling behind before it becomes a real problem.

Two details mattered more than the basic scheduling. First, the reminders were written to sound like they came from a real person, not a robotic auto-reply, which meant clients were more likely to actually read and respond to them rather than ignore another "your invoice is overdue" template. Second, when an account did fall behind, the system supported setting up structured payment plans rather than an all-or-nothing demand, letting struggling clients pay in installments while still making consistent progress toward the full balance.

For accounts that needed extra reach, the firm could also offer customers a payment portal where they could view their balance and pay directly online by card or bank transfer, removing a layer of friction that often delays payment even from clients who fully intend to pay.

The result: paid 54 days faster

The headline number from FHC's case study is simple: Docuflow started getting its invoices paid an average of 54 days faster than before automating the process. As FHC partner Francois van Heerden put it in the case study, the firm had already seen huge time savings using Chaser on its own books, and decided the same approach was worth extending to clients.

That kind of result isn't really about a clever algorithm doing something a human couldn't. It's about consistency. A reminder that goes out reliably on day one, day seven, and day fourteen of an overdue invoice, every single time, without depending on whether a staff member had a free hour that week, closes the gap between "we have a policy for chasing late payments" and "we actually execute that policy every time." Most firms have the former. Few consistently manage the latter by hand.

A second example: the same pattern at TaxAssist

FHC's experience isn't an isolated case. TaxAssist Accountants in Norwich, UK, followed a near-identical path. The firm first used Chaser to automate its own invoice chasing, cutting out the roughly three weeks per year it had previously spent on phone calls and manual follow-up emails. After seeing those results, TaxAssist began recommending the platform to its own clients.

The most striking outcome came from one of those clients, who used the automated system to recover £20,000 in old, unpaid debt in roughly 30 minutes once the structured follow-up sequence was switched on. TaxAssist owner Robin Johnson described it simply: the firm had achieved outstanding results for clients, including that £20,000 recovery, while keeping the actual messaging personalized and polite rather than aggressive.

What this case study actually demonstrates

It's worth being precise about what these two firms automated and what they didn't. Neither FHC nor TaxAssist handed over judgment calls, like deciding whether to escalate to formal debt collection, write off a bad debt, or grant a client special payment terms, to software. What they automated was the repetitive layer underneath those decisions: tracking which invoices are outstanding, sending the right reminder to the right person at the right time, and giving staff a real-time view of who's paid and who hasn't, instead of reconstructing that picture from a spreadsheet or an inbox every time someone needed to chase a payment.

That's a useful distinction for any accounting or bookkeeping firm considering something similar. The win isn't a system that decides things for you, it's a system that reliably executes the parts of the process that don't actually require a judgment call, freeing staff time for the parts that do.

Takeaways for other firms

A few things stand out across both cases that are worth pulling into a more general lesson. The firms automated their own internal accounts receivable process first, before rolling the same tool out to clients, which meant they were recommending something they'd already validated rather than untested software. The automated communication was deliberately built to look and sound human, with branded templates and a consistent tone, rather than the generic, easily-ignored reminders that come stock with most accounting software. And in both cases, the firms kept a path for flexibility, payment plans, portals, and human escalation when needed, rather than treating automation as an all-or-nothing replacement for judgment.

None of this required a large technology budget or a long implementation. Both firms integrated their existing accounting software directly with the automation platform and started seeing results within weeks. For a profession built on getting clients paid reliably and on time, that's a fairly direct return: less staff time spent on repetitive chasing, and client cash flow that improves measurably as a result.