Credit Control

Credit Control and Dunning for Telecoms Resellers

Chase overdue accounts on a schedule instead of from memory, working straight from the invoice ledger.

What credit control software does

Credit control software chases unpaid invoices for you. It tracks who owes money, sends reminders on a set schedule, steps up when they go unanswered, and hands your team a daily list of who to ring. SAFE CRM does this from inside your billing platform, so the balances it chases are the real ones.

Most resellers start by chasing from a spreadsheet. It works while you have thirty customers. At three hundred it becomes a real job: businesses affected by late payment spend an average of 86 hours a year chasing it (GOV.UK late payments research, 2025). The polite first reminder is the step that gets skipped when things are busy, and in our experience it is the one that recovers the most for the least effort.

Automating the routine part means the reminders always go, and your credit controller spends their time on the accounts that genuinely need a conversation.

SAFE CRM Credit Control dashboard showing total overdue balance across customers, an aged debt chart by age band, and a list of the largest overdue accounts

How the chase works

A chase pipeline is a ladder of steps. You define the rungs once, and accounts climb them until they pay or you step in.

  1. 1. Enrolment

    Each night the platform finds accounts that match your rules, such as more than £250 overdue by more than 14 days, and opens a case. No report to run, no list to review first.

  2. 2. Staged reminders

    Steps fire on the days you set: a gentle nudge, then a firmer one, then a call task for a human. Each step can send on its own or wait for approval.

  3. 3. Contact recorded

    Every attempt is logged against the case, including what was sent and what came back. When the customer says nobody told them, you can show them exactly what was sent and when.

  4. 4. Holds and arrangements

    Agree a payment plan and the chase pauses while it is kept. Put a case on hold for a fortnight and it resumes on its own. Break the plan and the case opens again on its own.

  5. 5. Payment closes it

    When the balance clears, the case closes itself. The invoice and the chase live in the same system, so that happens on the next daily sweep rather than whenever an integration next runs.

The credit control dashboard

Today's worklist

Who to ring, in order, with the balance, the age of the debt and what was last said to them. Not a report you have to interpret first.

Broken arrangements

Customers who agreed a plan and missed a payment. These are the accounts most likely to become bad debt, so they surface on their own.

Failed collections

Direct Debits and card payments that bounced, with the reason attached, so you can re-present, switch method, or ring the customer.

No way to pay

Customers who owe you money and have no usable mandate or live card. Fixing this list quietly removes next month's chasing.

Cards expiring

Payment cards about to expire, caught before the collection fails rather than after it.

Credit limits passed

Accounts over their overall limit, their unbilled call limit, their unsent invoice limit or their overdue limit, each raised as a task on its own.

Why chasing from the billing system is different

Plenty of tools will chase invoices. Almost all of them read your accounting or billing data through an integration, which introduces a delay and a failure point. In credit control both matter more than usual, because the cost of getting it wrong is a phone call to a customer who has already paid.

  • ✓No stale balances: the chase reads the invoice ledger directly. There is no overnight sync to be out of date.
  • ✓Collection results included: a failed Direct Debit shows up next to the invoice position, with no separate CRM sync in between, so the account steps up on the right day.
  • ✓Disputes respected: the "do not chase" flag suppresses reminders for accounts in dispute, so nothing embarrassing goes out mid-argument.
  • ✓Message purpose recorded: every send is marked as service or marketing. Marketing goes through consent and suppression checks, and a payment reminder stays a payment reminder, with nothing promotional bolted on.
  • ✓One audit trail: reminders, calls, arrangements, payments and write-offs sit on the same customer record as the invoices they relate to.

The measure of whether any of it is working is your aged debt position, and the single number worth trending is your debtor days. Our company site also has a guide to reading an aged debt report, and a walkthrough of the wider credit control process.

Where this fits against other tools

Most products in this space are one of three things. Accounting add-ons bolt a chase onto Sage or Xero. Debt recovery software picks up after the relationship has already broken down. Dedicated credit control tools sit alongside your billing and read it through an integration.

This is none of those. It is a credit control system inside the platform that raised the invoice, so the chase reads the ledger directly and there is no separate balance to keep in step. Every send is checked against the current position first.

For customers you would rather not invoice at all, auto top-up on a pre-pay account keeps the account funded in advance, so that usage never becomes a debt to chase. If you need to work out what a specific late invoice has cost you, there is a late payment interest calculator on the company site.

Credit Control Questions and Key Terms

What is credit control software?
Credit control software chases unpaid invoices for you. It watches who owes money, sends reminders on a schedule, steps up when they go unanswered, and gives your team a daily list of who to ring. Good credit control software works from the invoice ledger itself, so a customer who has just paid is not chased by mistake.
What is dunning?
Dunning is the formal name for chasing overdue payment: the sequence of reminders, letters, emails and calls that escalate while an invoice stays unpaid. A dunning process is simply that sequence written down so it happens the same way every time, whoever is on duty.
How do accounts get onto the chase list?
On its own. You set the rules for each chase pipeline, including how much must be overdue and for how many days. Accounts that meet the rules go on the list each night. Nobody has to run a report first. You can also add an account by hand when you want to.
Will a customer who has just paid still get chased?
Not if we can help it. The chase reads the invoice ledger directly, in the same system that raised the invoice, so there is no second copy to go stale. The daily sweep closes settled cases, and nothing is sent without a final eligibility check first. The limit is how fast a payment reaches you and gets recorded, not a sync between two systems.
Can I stop chasing a particular customer?
Yes, in two ways. A "do not chase" flag on the account suppresses credit control tasks entirely, which is useful for accounts in dispute or with an agreement in place. You can also place a temporary hold on a case, which pauses the chase for a set period and then resumes it automatically.
Can I agree a payment plan with someone?
Yes. Payment arrangements are recorded against the case with the amounts and dates agreed. The chase pauses while the customer keeps to it. If they miss an instalment the case opens again and goes back on the worklist, so a broken arrangement does not quietly become a written-off debt.
Do reminders go out without anyone checking them?
That is your choice per pipeline. Chase steps can send automatically, or they can queue for approval so someone reviews the wording before it leaves. Many resellers automate the early polite reminders and keep a human on the later, firmer ones.
How does this relate to credit limits?
The billing platform already tracks credit exposure per customer, covering the total balance, unbilled calls, unsent invoices and overdue invoices, with a separate call limit per number. When a customer passes a limit, a task is raised automatically. Credit control chasing and credit limits work off the same live figures.
Can I take payment during the chase?
Yes, and you can see what a customer is already set up to pay with while you work the case. Depending on the providers configured for your account, that can mean a secure payment link, a Direct Debit mandate through GoCardless, or a card payment through Stripe. There is also a worklist of customers who owe money and have no working way to pay you automatically, which is usually the most profitable list in the system.
What does aged debt mean?
Aged debt is what you are owed, grouped by how overdue it is, usually in 30, 60 and 90 day bands. The older a debt gets the less likely it is to be paid, so the shape of the aged debt report matters as much as the total.
What are debtor days?
Debtor days estimates how long your customers take to pay you, worked out as trade receivables divided by annual credit sales, multiplied by 365. It is the same measure American software calls DSO. It comes off your balance sheet rather than from each invoice, so read it as an indicator rather than an exact average. HMRC uses the same formula and warns that a normal figure varies a lot between trades. Compare it to your own payment terms: the gap between the two is the part credit control can close.
Is this the same as debt recovery software?
No. Debt recovery software is built for collecting debts that have already gone bad, often by an agency acting on your behalf. Credit control runs earlier, on live customer relationships you intend to keep, and its purpose is to stop an overdue invoice from ever becoming a recovery case.
Is late payment chasing regulated in the UK?
It depends on the debt and the customer. Chasing a business debt is not licensed activity, and the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 sets out what interest and recovery costs you may add. Consumer debt collection can be regulated, and telecoms providers also have to think about customers in vulnerable circumstances. A plain payment reminder with no promotion in it counts as a service message rather than marketing, as the ICO explains. Take advice on your own process.
Next step

Stop Chasing From a Spreadsheet

Book a demo and we will set up a chase ladder against your own overdue accounts, so you can see who it would have contacted, and when.

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