How AR software pricing actually works, and the four numbers to ask for

A bookkeeper told us recently that she'd looked into automated chasing and found the costs prohibitive. She hadn't seen our pricing. She was describing the category, and when we went and looked properly at how tools in this space actually charge, her reaction made complete sense.

The headline monthly number is usually the least important part. What determines whether a tool is affordable is the shape of the bill, not its size, because shape decides whether the cost is predictable and whether it grows at the worst possible moment.

Shape one: per minute of call time

Common wherever voice is involved. You pay a base fee, then per minute of talking.

The problem isn't the rate, it's that you don't control the variable. How long a call runs depends on how much your customer wants to explain, negotiate, or complain. A month with three long payment-arrangement conversations costs more than a month where everybody says "sorry, paying Friday" and hangs up. You cannot forecast it, so you can't put it in a budget, and the predictable response is to ration the calls. Which means rationing exactly the long conversations that were doing the work.

Shape two: per active debtor

You pay for each customer currently in a chasing sequence. It sounds fair and it scales in precisely the wrong direction.

The bill grows at the exact moment the problem does. A bad quarter, where more customers slip past terms, is a quarter where your chasing costs rise. Cash is tighter and the tool that's supposed to help costs more. A bad month costs you twice, and the incentive is to leave debtors out of the sequence to control the bill.

Shape three: a setup or onboarding fee

A one-off implementation charge before anything runs. In this category it commonly reaches four figures per organisation.

For a single business it's an annoyance. For a practice it's structural, because it makes every client a separate capital decision. You can't try a tool on three clients and expand to thirty if each new client costs four figures to start. So most practices run one pilot, and never run a second. The fee doesn't just cost money, it prevents the rollout that would have made the tool worthwhile.

Shape four: per connected organisation

A flat monthly fee per business whose ledger you're working. Predictable, forecastable, and it grows only when you deliberately add a client.

This is our shape, so read it as a stated preference rather than neutral analysis: per connected Xero organisation, no setup fee, nothing per minute, nothing per debtor. A client whose debtors triple costs the same as one whose debtors halve, and a long call that recovers $8,000 costs the same as a short one that recovers nothing.

On being the expensive option

Predictable doesn't mean cheap, and we should be straight about that. We're premium per ledger, roughly $100 to $200 a month above the email-and-SMS chasing tools. That's deliberate, and if you're comparing sticker prices we will lose.

What justifies it is that the alternative isn't one tool, it's several: quote follow-up, invoice chasing, an after-hours answering service, review requests. Bought separately that's roughly $210 a month of subscriptions that don't share a single fact about a customer, so the fifth contact sounds exactly like the first. One teammate with one memory of each customer is a different product from four tools in a bundle, which is the argument in a unified teammate versus a chasing dialler.

And the honest test isn't the monthly number either way. It's whether a tool recovers more than it costs. One won quote or one recovered invoice usually settles it, which is the arithmetic in how much a cold quote is costing you.

If you run a practice, the numbers that matter are your own: what you charge a client, what you pay at wholesale, and the unbillable hours you currently absorb chasing on their behalf. Our savings calculator puts the software premium in as a cost first, before any of the upside, so you can see whether it clears the bar for your book.

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