Why credit control teams are adding text messages to the invoice chase
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The Government’s late payment crackdown, announced in March as the toughest in over 25 years, put hard numbers on a problem every finance team already knows. Late payments cost the UK economy £11 billion a year, and 38 businesses close every day under the strain. New powers for the Small Business Commissioner, a 60-day cap on payment terms and mandatory statutory interest will all help, in time. The cash position this quarter still depends on something far less glamorous: how well a business chases what it is owed.
Most firms chase the same way they did fifteen years ago, with reminder emails and phone calls. One is cheap and widely ignored. The other works and refuses to scale. A growing number of credit control teams have started adding a third channel in between, and it is the one sitting in everyone’s pocket.
Where the email chase loses its audience
The majority of late invoices are late through process rather than refusal. The invoice is missing a PO number, it is sitting in an approval queue, or the one person who releases payments has two hundred unread emails. A polite reminder lands in that same crowded inbox and joins the queue it was meant to shorten.
Each cycle of this adds days. The reminder goes out, nothing happens for a week, a second reminder follows, then someone finally picks up the phone. By the time the call happens, the invoice is thirty days past due and the conversation has an edge it never needed to have.
What a text message changes in the chase cycle
A text message reaches a person rather than a shared inbox, and it tends to be read within minutes rather than days. It is short by nature, which suits a payment reminder well. There is no subject line to ignore and no attachment to open, just a sentence with the invoice number, the amount, the due date and a link to a copy of the invoice or the payment page.
Timing changes the tone. A message three days before the due date reads as service rather than pressure, and it catches the forgotten-invoice cases before they become overdue at all. A message on the day after the due date is still friendly, and it starts the clock visibly. The phone call then becomes the escalation step for genuine problems instead of the default tool for every account.
For businesses with customers across Europe or further afield, the same logic extends to WhatsApp, which in many markets is where business conversations already happen.
Making it part of the process without souring relationships
The teams doing this well treat the chase as a fixed sequence rather than an ad hoc scramble. The invoice goes out by email as usual. A courtesy text follows three days before the due date. On the day after the due date, a second text confirms the invoice is now outstanding. Three days later a firmer message names a date, and a call follows if it passes. By the time a formal letter mentions statutory interest, now set at 8% above base rate under the new regime, there is a clean, timestamped trail showing every reasonable step.
Two practical points keep this from backfiring. The first is consent and contact quality: collect a mobile number for the accounts contact at onboarding and state plainly in your terms that payment reminders may arrive by text. The second is restraint. A chase sequence that fires too often burns goodwill with customers you want to keep, the same message fatigue problem marketers manage, applied to credit control. Three or four well-timed messages per invoice are plenty.
Running this by hand defeats the purpose, which is why teams put it on messaging platforms such as TopMessage, scheduling SMS and WhatsApp reminders from templates per stage, logging replies alongside the account, and letting the sequence run itself until an account genuinely needs a human.
The arithmetic that makes finance directors pay attention
Every day trimmed from debtor days is working capital the business does not have to borrow. For a firm with £200,000 a month in receivables, pulling average collection forward by a week frees roughly £46,000 of cash on a permanent basis, at no cost beyond a few pence per message. For lenders and brokers, the same logic reads from the other side of the table: a client with a disciplined, documented chase cycle is a better book than one who starts chasing at day forty.
The crackdown will tighten the rules over the coming years. The chase cycle is the part a business controls today, and the firms quietly adding a text message between the email and the phone call are the ones finding that most late invoices never needed to become late at all.