You did the job. You did it well. The customer said thanks and shook your hand. Thirty days later the invoice is still sitting there, and you're doing the maths on whether one more awkward phone call is worth it. Multiply that by a dozen customers and a couple of builders, and that's your cash flow sitting in other people's bank accounts.
It isn't because you don't care about getting paid. It's because chasing is uncomfortable, it's always the last job of the day, and it's easy to put off when the van is loaded for tomorrow. Most people who owe you aren't dodging you either. They forgot, the invoice went to a spam folder, or the property manager is waiting on the owner to approve it.
So the debt sits. The first reminder goes out late, if at all. By the time someone finally rings, it's 60 days and the conversation is a lot harder than it needed to be.
Debtor chasing is a perfect job for an agent. It's rules-based, it needs to happen on time every time, and it needs to stay polite on the fifth reminder the same way it was on the first. An agent doesn't get annoyed, doesn't get embarrassed and doesn't forget.
In our agent team, chasing payments sits with the service agent, because getting paid is the last stage of delivering the job. Here's a typical sequence. You set the timing and approve the wording.
For builders and commercial clients, it follows the payment terms on the company record, not the homeowner timing. A builder on 30-day terms shouldn't be getting a day-one nudge.
This is where most automated reminders go wrong. A dumb reminder workflow fires on a date. It doesn't know the customer paid yesterday, or that they've got a callback open because the new hot water unit is leaking. Sending "your account is overdue" to someone waiting on you to fix their job is a fast way to lose a customer and earn a one-star review.
Because the agent works on HubSpot, it checks the whole job before it sends anything:
None of that works if the invoice, the job and the customer are in different places. It's the same lesson as putting jobs, quotes and invoices on one record, and the same point I made in bad context in, bad agent out. The agent is only as polite as the data lets it be.
Money stays with a person. That's a fixed rule across every agent we build, and in debtor chasing it's non-negotiable. The agent will never:
Any of those goes straight to you, with the history attached. Debt recovery has rules in Australia (the ACCC and ASIC have a debt collection guideline for businesses), and staying well inside them is easy when the agent's job is simply friendly reminders and a clean hand-off. If you need advice on recovery itself, that's a conversation for your accountant or lawyer, not an agent.
Like every agent, it starts by drafting. For the first couple of weeks, each reminder waits for a quick approve or edit. We've written about why in approval-gated outreach. Once 95% of its drafts are approved unchanged for two weeks, the routine reminders can go on their own. The hand-offs never do.
Before we switch it on, we measure today: how many invoices are overdue, the total owed, the average days to get paid, and how many hours a week someone spends chasing. That's the baseline.
Then each month the agent gets a scorecard. What it sent, how much was paid after a reminder, how many accounts it handed to a person, what it cost to run, and the net return. As an illustrative example, if a business has $40,000 sitting over 30 days and the agent brings average payment time down by a week or two, that's real money back in the account sooner, plus the hours nobody spends on awkward calls. Your numbers will be your own, which is why we measure them first.
It's the same chasing pattern we use for paperwork in professional services, which I covered in the document-chasing agent. Different industry, same idea: polite, persistent, logged, and a person steps in when it gets tricky.
If you're sick of being the bank for your customers, have a look at how our debtor agent works. Then Build my solution and we'll map the reminders, rules and hand-offs to your invoices and your HubSpot. Want to check your data first? Book an AI Readiness Audit.