At Chaser, we’re incredibly passionate about tackling the global scourge of late payment. In the UK and Australia alone, small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) were at last count owed £55bn and $19bn in overdue invoices, respectively. We’re all about helping you get sales invoices paid on time.
Polite Persistence Pays when it comes to chasing up your customers to pay their invoices on time. Customers will often opportunistically be leaving money in their bank account rather than paying your overdue invoices. Polite persistent chasing forces them to justify the unjustifiable of why they are continuing not to pay you.
Chaser is a dedicated platform for carrying out this polite persistent chasing automatically. Since we launched in August 2014, we’ve been thrilled with the average 26 debtor day reduction and consequent 7.1% of turnover cashflow boost we’ve been able to deliver our users. This week Xero, the accounting system we integrate with, released their exciting new invoice reminders functionality. The purpose of this blog post is to clarify where Chaser fits into this new landscape.
What You Can Do With Xero’s Invoice Reminders
- You can set a track of up to five different reminder emails
- You can set these different reminders to go out at a set number of days by reference to a given invoice’s due date (e.g. a 7 day overdue reminder for an invoice due on 31 October 2015 would be sent out on Saturday 7 November 2015)
- You can then switch off reminders for particular customers and individual invoices that you don’t want to receive them
- On the appointed day by reference to due date, a reminder about each outstanding invoice will be sent out to your customer from invoicereminders@post.xero.com between 4am and 8am in your timezone
- You can set an email address of your choosing for replies to those reminders to be sent to
Where Chaser Is Different
As Xero highlight in their own blog, they’ve kept their reminders functionality simple. Chaser is a platform dedicated to bringing you the best possible results from polite persistent chasing. For us this is all about automated humanity. The minute chasers start to look and feel like automated emails they lose such a huge amount of their impact. If it doesn’t feel like a human being on the other end of the process, it is so easy to ignore. We know this in the first instance from our own qualified Accountant and Finance Director experience. 
This dedication to automated humanity informs everything we do as a platform. Just some of its hallmarks are:
- Our multi functionality whereby separate invoices for the same customer are automatically chased within the same chaser. This as opposed to sending separate ones at the exact same time on the same day, a big red flag of automation
- The ability to set the day(s) and time each week that you want your chasers to be sent. To both tie in with when you would send them manually. But even more importantly to tie in with when you can do your bank reconciliation. Thereby avoiding the risk of damaging customer relationships by chasing invoices that have in fact already been paid, just not yet reconciled as such on Xero
- Sending chasers to reflect your normal email address that you’d send them from manually. Alongside this is the ability to set an email signature to match your normal emails. All by way of replicating that personal touch that will ensure the chasers have the maximum impact in getting your invoices paid
- The ability to set different schedules or tracks of different email templates at different points by reference to invoice due date for different groups of customers and invoices. This way you can truly tailor chasing horses for different chasing courses. For example chasing your good paying customers with a different tone and frequency to your, shall we charitably say, less good paying ones!
Alongside all of this, we provide the ability to automatically send thanks for paying messages within 24 working hours of an invoice being marked or reconciled as fully paid on Xero. This is a great complement to the polite persistence having been successful and really helps bolster customer relationships.
Finally, there is our revolutionary communication platform for capturing the entire chasing conversation. All chasers, replies from your customer and replies from you back to your customer are automatically captured within Chaser alongside being delivered as normal. In our experience, approximately 80% of invoices can be successfully collected through email chasing alone. The remainder will require some escalation, usually telephone being the next avenue. With the entire email chasing conversation to date automatically in Chaser, there’s no more rooting through your inbox and sent items to piece the picture back together. It’s all automatically already in Chaser.
The New Landscape
We’re really proud of the ways in which we’re helping businesses with their chasing: an average 26 debtor day reduction equivalent to a cashflow boost of 7.1% of turnover - a one off free investment that the business can invest in growth. Alongside this, an average manual chasing time saving of 3.5 weeks a year. We’re very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with pioneers of cloud accounting, including Paul Bulpitt, Co-founder of Xero platinum partner The Wow Company, who recently gave Chaser this endorsement:
We’re thrilled to be the recognised best in class product in our category on Xero’s add-on marketplace.
There is some great core functionality in Xero’s invoice reminders. And we wouldn’t want anyone to incur unnecessary time and future expense on using Chaser where that functionality is sufficient for their needs. That’s why we’ve changed the welcome email we send out to new users to check that Chaser is definitely for them.
At the same time, we’d love to welcome you (and your clients if you are an accountant or bookkeeper) to our growing community of users and show you the results we can deliver when you sign up to our completely no obligation, super quick to setup free trial.
