Onboard a client to invoice follow-up in the first week

You have agreed to follow up on a client's unpaid invoices. The contract is signed and the client is waiting. The first week decides whether this becomes a service they thank you for, or one they quietly cancel because a reminder went to the wrong person.

This is a checklist for that first week, day by day, with the questions to ask and the things to write down. It works whether you send the reminders yourself or use software to draft them.

Before day one: what you are agreeing to

Settle these in the contract or a short email, not in a phone call you will forget.

• **What you will do.** Send reminders, answer replies, and report. Say whether you will phone customers.
• **What you will not do.** Offer payment plans, write off balances, charge fees, or start legal action. Those stay with the client.
• **How you are paid.** A monthly fee for the service is simpler to explain than a cut of what you collect.
• **How you will report.** One short message a week is plenty to start with.

If a client says chasing is not what they hired a bookkeeper for, that is fine. You are selling follow-up as a defined service, and defined means they know exactly what they are buying.

Day 1: get access and read the books

• Get your own login to the client's QuickBooks Online or Xero. Do not use the client's password. A named login for you is safer for both sides.
• Check what role you were given and what it lets you see. If the client only wanted to share part of the books, find out now.
• Run the aged receivables report. In QuickBooks it is the A/R Aging Summary. In Xero it is Aged Receivables Summary. Save a copy with today's date. This is your starting point, and you will compare against it in a month.
• Note the oldest overdue invoices and the five largest balances.

Day 2: clean the customer list

Bad data causes most of the embarrassing emails. Spend time here.

• **Missing emails.** Make a list of customers who owe money and have no email address. You cannot remind them until you have one.
• **Wrong contacts.** Check that the email on each large customer is the person who pays, not the person who ordered.
• **Duplicates.** The same customer entered twice splits their balance and means two reminders for one debt.
• **Credits and unapplied payments.** If a customer has a credit memo or a payment that was never matched to an invoice, they may owe nothing. Apply it first. Chasing someone who has already paid is the quickest way to lose a client's trust.

Send the client the list of missing contacts and ask them to fill the gaps by day 4.

Day 3: have the conversation about customers

This is a fifteen-minute call with the client. Go through the top overdue customers one by one and ask:

• Is there anything I should know about this customer?
• Is there a dispute, a promise to pay, or a favour involved?
• Would you rather I did not email this one at all?
• Who should the reminders come from, and in what tone?

Write the answers down in the customer's record. Put the do-not-chase names in a list you can check before every send.

Ask one more thing: "If a customer replies angry, what do you want me to do?" The answer is often "tell me and I will call them," and now you know.

Day 4: choose the schedule and write the wording

Keep the first schedule simple. A reasonable pattern is a heads-up before the due date, a reminder on the due date, a first overdue reminder a week later, and a firmer one two weeks after that. Our post on the dunning templates has wording you can start from, and you can change it to match the client's voice.

Agree with the client:

• The days each reminder goes out.
• The sender name and reply address.
• The minimum balance below which you do not chase.
• The day you stop emailing and hand the invoice back to the client.

Different customers may need different schedules. A large long-standing customer should not get the same sequence as a new one with a small balance. Two or three groups are enough to start.

Day 5: do a dry run before anything goes out

Draft the first round of reminders and have the client read every one. This is the single most useful thing in the week.

• Send the first few to yourself or to the client so you can see how they look.
• Check amounts, invoice numbers, due dates and payment links.
• Check each one against the do-not-chase list.
• Ask the client to approve the first batch in writing, even if it is a one-line reply.

Do not start with a full backlog. Invoices that are months overdue need a different message than one that is three days late. Handle the old ones by hand with the client, and let the schedule take the newer ones.

Day 6 and 7: send, watch, and report

• Send the approved batch. Note the date.
• Check for replies the same day and the next. Answer each one, or pass it to the client with a short summary.
• Pause reminders on any invoice where the customer replied and is waiting on someone.
• Write the first weekly report.

Keep the first report short:

• How many customers were contacted.
• Which replied, and what they said.
• Which invoices were paid since day 1.
• Anything you need from the client.

Compare the aged receivables report to the copy you saved on day 1. Report the real change in numbers, even if it is small. A modest honest result is better than a promise you cannot keep.

The first-week checklist

• Own login to the books, role confirmed.
• Aged receivables report saved and dated.
• Customers with no email listed and sent to the client.
• Duplicates, credits and unapplied payments checked.
• Do-not-chase list written.
• Schedule, sender and stop day agreed in writing.
• First batch drafted and approved by the client.
• First weekly report sent.

Running this across many clients

Do this once and it is a job. Do it for ten clients and you need a repeatable version: the same checklist and the same questions each time, with only the customer notes changing. Write your version down once and reuse it. Our page for bookkeepers covers how we think about running follow-up across many books, and the pilot plan for many QuickBooks client books walks through starting with one book and adding the next. If you sell this as a service, see how a bookkeeper can sell invoice follow-up as a service.

If you want software for the drafting step, Mugavi drafts reminders for what is already overdue in QuickBooks or Xero and sends nothing until the owner approves it, with a 30-second hold after approval. The QuickBooks connection is in beta, late fees are not written back to QuickBooks, and there is no read-only team role for a helper yet. A spreadsheet and your own email work for a handful of clients.