Old Way vs AI Way: A Better Approach to Chasing Overdue Invoices

For accountants and finance officers, chasing overdue invoices is one of the most repetitive and mentally draining tasks. You need to stay firm but polite, detailed but concise — and every email needs to sound professional. The problem is that writing the perfect reminder from scratch takes time. Doing it ten times a week can drain your energy and eat into time you need for financial reporting, reconciliations, and month-end work.

Traditionally, finance teams stare at a blank screen and try to craft the “right” wording for each follow-up. You make minor edits, adjust the tone, double-check the invoice details, and hope you don’t sound too harsh or too soft. It’s not that the emails are difficult — they’re simply repetitive. And those tiny bits of extra work build up over a month, creating an invisible productivity drain.

Here’s the difference the AI-assisted method makes: instead of writing the entire email manually, you enter the basic facts — the invoice number, due date, amount, and type of client — into an AI assistant. Then you ask it to generate three versions of a gentle but firm follow-up message. You’re not outsourcing judgment; you’re outsourcing the repetitive drafting. You still choose the message that fits the situation and adjust the tone based on your knowledge of the client.

What makes this workflow powerful is consistency. Every follow-up email is structured, clear, and professional. You no longer worry about tone variations or rushed sentences. You also save time — often several hours a week — because you’re editing a draft instead of writing a full message from scratch. And when you handle dozens of invoices, that time adds up.

Once you remove repetitive drafting from your plate, you gain more time for deeper financial tasks — forecasting, reporting, variance analysis, and supporting leadership decisions. AI doesn’t make you less credible as a finance professional; it frees you from the small tasks so you can focus on the ones that truly matter.

If you’re an accountant or finance professional and want to learn the exact workflow for using AI in follow-ups, reporting, and financial summaries, join our role-based, tool-agnostic AI workshop. We focus on real finance tasks — not software tutorials.