Invoice follow-up for manufacturers and industrial SMEs
In manufacturing, the invoice often waits for goods receipt, and one quality dispute is enough to freeze payment on a whole order. The agent chases each invoice with the delivery note and acceptance report attached, and detects holds linked to an open non-conformity instead of chasing blind.
In your day-to-day
- 01
Reminder at due date with invoice, signed delivery note and certificate of conformity attached automatically.
- 02
Reminder sequence paused when a non-conformity is open on the order, flagged to the quality team and the account manager.
- 03
Escalation when a client’s outstanding balance exceeds your credit-insurance ceiling or a threshold you set.
A typical scenario
A 60-person sheet-metal fabricator carries €800k in receivables, with a part-time bookkeeper who chases invoices “once payroll is done” — meaning one week a month.
- 01
On Sunday night the agent sweeps the ledger and spots a tooling down-payment invoice twelve days overdue — unnoticed because it follows no delivery schedule.
- 02
On a key account’s supplier portal, three invoices sit at “price mismatch”: the agent pulls them out of the standard reminder flow and assembles the arbitration file for sales admin, order and current price list attached.
- 03
Five days before a bill-of-exchange due date, the accepted draft still has not come back: the client’s accounting department receives a duplicate with a factual nudge.
What changes
Collections stop depending on the bookkeeper’s spare time, and portal blockages surface the same week — not on next month’s bank statement.
Order of magnitude
Working assumptions
- →€800k in receivables at an average 60-day collection delay
- →day-in, day-out systematic follow-up typically wins back 8 to 10 days of DSO
That is roughly €105k to €130k of cash made permanently available (€800k × 8–10/60) — with no new hire and no factoring.
Indicative estimate built on average sector assumptions — it gets recalibrated on your actual volumes during scoping.
What eats your days
- →
Supply shortages are discovered when the work order is released — and scheduling gets redone by hand in a rush.
- →
The sales-admin inbox mixes PDF orders, supplier confirmations, delivery-date requests and quality claims — everything is retyped, nothing is prioritised.
- →
Key accounts demand EDI, supplier portals and service-rate indicators — and it is your team copying data from one system to another.
How it works
- 1
Plugged into your invoicing
The agent reads your existing tool — invoicing, accounting, ERP — with no migration and no double entry. It knows every invoice, its due date and its history.
- 2
Written reminders, not templates
Each reminder is written for that client: friendly for a good payer one week late, firm and documented by the third notice. You approve the policy once; the agent applies it.
- 3
Escalation and audit trail
Sensitive account, dispute, large amount: the agent hands over to a human with full context. Every action is logged, every euro recovered is attributed.
Typical results
-30%
average collection delay, typical order of magnitude
100%
of overdue invoices chased, no exceptions, no oversights
0 h
of human time on first-level reminders
Orders of magnitude observed in production; your diagnostic sets your own baseline and targets.
Frequently asked questions
What does the agent do when a client withholds payment over a quality dispute?+
It detects the link between the invoice and the open non-conformity, pauses the reminder sequence and hands the case to the quality team with the history. Chasing a client mid-dispute is the surest way to anger them — the agent never does it.
Our key accounts use supplier portals with self-billing — does that work?+
Yes: each account’s rules — self-billing, imposed payment terms, portal statuses — are configured at go-live. The agent follows the portal statuses and only chases what genuinely needs chasing, through the accepted channel.
Is this the problem eating your team’s time?
Tell us how you work today — 30-minute call, then a free written diagnostic of what this agent would change for you, with numbers.
Get my free diagnosticFree resource
Get the self-assessment grid for your sector
Sales, admin, support, operations: the 20 tasks AI agents already handle in SMEs — with, for each one, the tell-tale sign that your team is concerned.