Collections follow up

Collections is where an automated message can destroy a customer relationship in one sentence. The rules are about who not to chase: anyone in dispute, anyone whose invoice is wrong, anyone whose payment is already in flight.

The job on one screen

Runs when	Daily across overdue invoices.
Reads	Invoice age, amount, payment history, open disputes, and the relationship owner.
Decides	Whether to chase, how firmly, and who should send it.
Produces	A drafted message for approval, or a hold with the reason.
Stops when	Draft prepared. Sending is a human action.
Tools it needs	Accounting API, CRM, mail draft.
Autonomy to start at	Approve. It does the work and stops before the irreversible step.

Optional: load a real model

Run it

The policy, in the order it is applied

First match wins, and the trace names the clause. If you cannot write your policy as a list like this, an agent is not your first problem.

Clause, in order	Outcome	Reason given
Open dispute	reject	Never chase a disputed invoice. The dispute is the conversation, and a reminder makes it worse.
Payment already in flight	reject	Chasing money that is on its way is how you look disorganised to your own customer.
Over 60 days and over 10k	escalate	Large and old belongs to a person with authority to negotiate, not to a template.
Over 30 days	approve	Firm second reminder, copying the account owner, with the invoice and payment link attached.
Nothing matched	approve	Polite first reminder. Most late payments are an unopened email, not a refusal.

Where this one goes wrong

Chasing your own error

If the invoice is wrong, the reminder is an insult. Check credit notes and disputes before every send.

Escalating tone too fast

The third reminder in nine days reads as aggression and gets forwarded to your account owner by an angry customer.

Ignoring who they are

A strategic account and a small one need different handling, and only a person can weigh that.

How you would know it is working

Measure	Why that one
Days sales outstanding	The finance outcome.
Complaints per hundred reminders	The relationship cost, and it is rarely measured.
Disputes discovered	A good collections agent surfaces broken invoices you did not know about.

Earning more rope

Assist	Produce the chase list for the finance team.
Approve	Draft per invoice with the right tone, human sends. Right level.
Auto	Auto-send only the first, gentle reminder under a small value cap, never anything later in the ladder.

The rules that matter are the do-not-send rules. Build those first and the rest of this agent is a mail merge.

Related: Invoice matching · Churn watch · Guardrails · all agent jobs · Agent Lab home

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