Get paid faster

You've got an invoice that was due a fortnight ago. You know it. You've known it every evening since. What stops you chasing isn't the time, it's the small act of deciding, each time, how firm to be with somebody you still want as a customer.

Chapter 13 of The AI Manager has a line for this. Write the judgement you make most often as an instruction, with its stopping rule inside. You decide once, on a calm Tuesday, how you chase. Then you never decide it again at nine at night.

The decision, made once

Sit down with your last ten late invoices and answer four questions on paper.

1. When is late? Not the date on the invoice. The day you'd actually start to mind.
2. What does the first reminder sound like? Warm. It assumes they forgot, because most of them did.
3. What does the second sound like? Clear. The amount, the date, how to pay, one sentence that keeps the relationship.
4. When do you stop and pick up the phone? That's the stopping rule, and it's the line most people never write.

Those four answers are the whole instruction. Everything else is the machine filling in a name and a figure from your records.

What good and bad look like

Chapter 4 says the line everybody skips in a brief is what bad looks like, and it does more work than the line about what's good. So say it.

Bad is a reminder that sounds like a solicitor. Bad is a reminder that apologises for existing. Bad is any figure, any date or any name that didn't come from your invoice file. Write those three down, and the drafts you get back will stop needing you to rewrite them.

Good is a message you'd be happy for your best customer to read by accident.

A draft is not a decision

Here's the rule to hold on to. The machine drafts. You send.

That sounds slow and it isn't. A draft that's right takes you ten seconds to read and one click to send. A draft that's wrong tells you something, usually that your records are wrong, which is worth knowing before the customer tells you. Chapter 3 is about the small lift you feel when something comes back looking fine. The date looks fine. The amount looks fine. Looking fine is the moment to look.

So the first reminder goes out the day your rule says, drafted for you, read by you. The second goes out when the rule says, the same way. On the day the rule says stop, you ring. You'll find that most invoices never get to the call, because the first warm note was all it took, and that was the note you'd been putting off.

Do the same thing on the way in

The invoice that gets paid fastest is the one that was sent the day the job finished, with the right figure on it, to the right person. Most late invoices were late out before they were late back.

Write that job down too. When I say the job's done, draft the invoice from the quote, in my format, and show it to me. A quote that becomes an invoice without being retyped carries fewer mistakes, and a customer who gets the bill while they're still pleased with the work pays it.

The part I won't pretend about

It won't know which customer is about to go under, or which one is a friend of a friend, or which one is late because your own work was late and they're too polite to say. That's judgement, and chapter 2 is clear that judgement isn't close to being a machine's job. Keep a line in your rules that says if there's anything I'd want to know before this goes, ask me, and expect to be asked more than you'd like for the first month.

The honest limit is this. A chasing rule written on a calm Tuesday is better than a decision made at nine at night, every time, until the month your business changes and the rule doesn't. Read your four answers again every quarter, because the business they were written for keeps moving and the rule doesn't move with it.

From chapter 13 of The AI Manager, Decide It Once, Then Never Again, and chapter 4, Instructions Are the Answer. Free to read.