In my last few posts I spoke about Order Management, where your orders actually get stuck, and once you found it, how to escalate it. This time, follow that story downstream, and a different question shows up.
The order cleared, fulfilment hit its dates, the invoice went out correct and on time, and it's still sitting unpaid 45 days later.
The instinct is to blame the customer, slow to pay, difficult, disorganised, but usually that's not it. The real reason is simpler and less flattering: every overdue account gets treated the same way, same template, same cadence, same place in the queue, whether it's the first reminder that's ever gone out or the third.
Put two accounts side by side, a €500 balance from a customer who's just forgotten, and a €50,000 balance from a customer who's disputed twice this quarter and is paying later each cycle. Send both the same generic chase email on the same Tuesday and you're not managing risk, you're managing a spreadsheet.
That's not a collections effort problem, it's a visibility one. The pattern of who pays late, who disputes often, and who's genuinely at risk is already sitting in the data, most teams have just never had a way to see it before the account is already overdue.
Over to you, I want to hear your thoughts:
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How do you currently decide which accounts get chased first, oldest invoice, biggest balance, or something more structured than that?
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Is there a "problem customer" everyone on the team already knows about, long before any system flags them?