Golden Horizons
CAPABILITY · OPS & BACK-OFFICE
Invoice Chaser
Overdue invoices get chased on a tone-appropriate cadence without owner involvement.
$5,500 build · $1,500–2,500/mo
Talk to us about a Invoice Chaser build →What it does
Monitors your accounting system for overdue invoices. Sends escalating reminder messages by email and SMS in your brand voice. Stops automatically on payment. Logs every touchpoint and reports DSO trend to the owner weekly.
Most small businesses don't have a collections problem. They have an awkwardness problem. The invoice goes out, 30 days pass, nothing comes back, and nobody makes the call because the owner doesn't want to damage the relationship and the front desk didn't sign up to be the bad guy. So the money sits. The invoice ages. And by the time someone finally follows up — usually at 60 or 90 days when the cash squeeze is impossible to ignore — the conversation is harder than it would have been at day four.
Accounts receivable that nobody actively manages becomes a slow bleed. A contractor carrying $40,000 in unpaid draws across three jobs isn't broke — they're waiting. A property manager with twelve net-30 tenants and a 40% on-time payment rate isn't undercapitalized — they're unorganized. The money exists. The follow-up doesn't.
The Invoice Chaser runs a four-stage reminder cadence tied to your actual invoice due dates — a friendly confirmation at three days past due, a firmer nudge at seven days, a direct statement of concern at fourteen, and a formal past-due notice at thirty. Every message goes out in your brand voice, not a generic collections template. Tone escalates gradually rather than jumping straight to demand, because the goal is payment from a client who stays a client, not a check from someone who never comes back. The system sends by email first, flips to SMS if email goes unanswered, and stops the moment a payment posts in your accounting system — no chasing a client who already paid.
Every outbound message is logged with timestamp, channel, and delivery status. The owner gets a weekly DSO snapshot — which invoices moved, which are aging, which have gone quiet long enough to warrant a direct conversation. That escalation flag is where the system hands off. Genuinely disputed invoices, clients asking for payment plans, or accounts that have gone completely silent for forty-five days get surfaced to the owner with a full contact history attached, so the human conversation starts with context instead of confusion.
Golden Horizons wires this directly into QuickBooks, Xero, or Wave — no manual exports, no spreadsheet tracking, no one remembering to check the AR aging report on Fridays. The accounting system stays the source of truth. The chaser runs off it automatically.
Use cases
- A commercial laundry company on net-45 hotel contracts was carrying significant outstanding AR because the owner handled follow-up personally — which meant inconsistently. After connecting to QuickBooks, the 7-day and 14-day reminders moved two of three hotel clients to consistent on-time payment.
- A two-partner CPA firm running a net-60 client base had always treated follow-up as the admin's job, but the admin had no script and no authority. Invoice Chaser gave the firm a documented cadence — gentle at 7 days past due, direct at 21, formal at 45 — and the admin's only job became reviewing.
- A residential GC managing three active builds was chasing retainage and draw payments across different timelines on each job. Invoice Chaser tracked each draw separately, sent reminders tied to contract milestones rather than calendar dates, and flagged the one client who went quiet at 30 days —.
- A dental practice collecting patient balances after insurance adjudication lost money on small co-pays because staff felt awkward calling about $80. Invoice Chaser handled the first two touchpoints automatically, surfacing only accounts over $300 still unpaid at 30 days for a direct staff call.
- A small property management company with 22 residential units was manually tracking rent arrears in a spreadsheet. After connecting to their Wave account, Invoice Chaser ran the 3-day, 7-day, and 14-day cadence automatically and cut the owner's monthly follow-up work from roughly four hours to a.
What’s included
- Fixed scope with written acceptance criteria before any build starts
- Customization layer for your brand voice and business rules
- Clean handover with documented runbook and live training
- Monthly ROI report for three months post-delivery
- Source code delivered to your GitHub on handover
What’s NOT included
- Third-party API subscription costs (billed to your accounts)
- Data migration from legacy systems
- Ongoing infrastructure costs after handover
Retainer
Monthly retainer covers monitoring, prompt tuning, config refinement, and minor integration additions. Range: $1,500–2,500/mo.
How clients use this
Fixed-scope build with clean handover, then an optional monthly retainer covering maintenance, monitoring, and minor changes. Most clients move to retainer within 60 days of delivery.
Part of
Used in: Law Firms , real-estate-agents , construction-firms
Questions Invoice Chaser clients ask
Can we control how firm the tone gets? We don't want to alienate long-term clients.
Yes — tone calibration is part of the build, not an afterthought. Before we go live, we draft all four cadence messages with you and get your sign-off on each one. The 3-day message is deliberately light — a friendly heads-up, nothing more. Tone sharpens at 7 and 14 days, and the 30-day message is formal but not hostile. You can also configure exceptions: a VIP client list that gets a softer track, or accounts where the 30-day escalation skips the automated message entirely and just flags the owner for a personal call. The system chases the invoice, but you decide how hard.
What happens when a client responds saying the invoice is disputed or they want a payment plan?
Any reply — email or SMS — pauses the automated cadence on that invoice and creates an escalation flag in the weekly owner report. We don't try to resolve disputes or negotiate payment plans programmatically; that's a human conversation. What the system does is give the owner a complete contact log when the conversation happens: which messages went out, when, what channel, and what the client responded. The owner walks into the conversation with full context instead of having to reconstruct it from memory. If the client agrees to a payment plan, the owner logs the arrangement and sets a manual follow-up date — the chaser can optionally resume on the remaining balance if a payment posts short of the total.
Which accounting systems does Invoice Chaser connect to, and how does it know when payment posts?
We connect to QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Wave through their official APIs — no CSV imports, no manual syncing. The integration listens for payment events in real time: when a payment posts and the invoice closes out as paid, the chaser stops immediately on that invoice. There's no lag and no risk of sending a reminder to someone who already paid. The weekly DSO report pulls directly from the same accounting data, so the numbers the owner sees match what's in the books. If your firm uses a different system, we scope that during the audit call — most cloud-based accounting platforms with an API can be connected, though build time may extend slightly depending on the integration complexity.
Are there any legal considerations for automated payment reminders, especially for B2C clients?
For B2B collections — business clients, commercial accounts, professional services — standard reminder cadences are generally straightforward. For B2C situations, where you're collecting from individual consumers rather than businesses, the FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act) sets rules around communication frequency, timing, and required disclosures, though the Act primarily applies to third-party debt collectors rather than original creditors collecting their own debts. That said, several states have their own consumer protection rules that can apply to original creditors. We flag this during scoping: if your client base is primarily individual consumers and balances are significant, we'll recommend your attorney review the message templates before go-live. The build can accommodate required disclosures as static footers on the appropriate messages. We're engineers, not lawyers — the compliance sign-off stays with your counsel.
How long does it take to see AR days actually improve after the build ships?
The cadence starts running on the first invoice that hits its due date after go-live, so the system is working from day one. Whether that moves the DSO number depends on your current baseline. Businesses with no existing follow-up process at all — invoices sent and then passively waited on — tend to see a material shift in the first billing cycle, simply because clients who would have waited to be asked are now being asked on a schedule. Businesses that already had informal follow-up in place tend to see the improvement show up in the 30-to-60-day bucket, where the consistent cadence replaces the inconsistent human one. We pull a baseline DSO snapshot before go-live and track against it monthly during the retainer — that's how we know the system is actually working, not just running.