The 60-day chase ladder: what to send, when, and when to pick up the phone

Ask ten businesses what their collections process is and most will describe the same thing: the reminders are switched on, and then at some point somebody gets annoyed enough to chase manually. That's not a process, it's a temperament.

A ladder is the alternative. Each rung has a channel, a timing, a job, and an escalation. It runs whether or not anybody feels like it, and it ends deliberately rather than trailing off.

Days 7, 14 and 21: written, polite, factual

The first three rungs are email. Invoice attached, amount and due date stated, a payment link, no threat and no personality. The goal is to be easy to act on, not persuasive.

Most of your ledger pays here, and that's the entire point of automating it. These invoices were never in trouble. Somebody filed the invoice and forgot, or the approver was on leave, and a factual reminder solves it. Spending human attention on this band is waste.

Day 30: the rung everybody is missing

This is where written chasing stops working, and it's also where Xero's native reminders stop entirely: five reminders, then silence. From Xero's own product ideas board, in a customer's words:

Which is backwards. The automation handles the easy band and a person picks up the hard one by hand. And the hard band is hard for a specific reason: an invoice still open at day 30 is usually not unpaid because somebody forgot. There's a dispute nobody logged, a cashflow problem, an invoice that never reached the person who approves payments, or a change of circumstances. Every one of those requires a question to be asked, and email cannot ask a question.

So day 30 is a call. Not a recorded message and not a fourth reminder with a firmer subject line. A conversation whose job is diagnosis: find out which of those four situations you're actually in, because each has a different next step. The full argument for why the channel matters here is in why a phone call still beats an SMS blast.

Day 45: the call that asks for a date

The second call has a narrower job: agree a specific date and amount, and record them. "I'll sort it soon" is not an outcome. "$2,400 on the 12th" is.

Then two things have to happen automatically, and this is where most processes leak. The chasing pauses, because continuing to chase somebody who just committed is how you lose them. And if the date passes unpaid, the sequence resumes at the right rung, referencing the promise rather than starting from scratch. That mechanism is the difference between a promise and a note, and it's covered in promise-to-pay tracking.

Day 60: a person, or a decision to stop

Sixty days is where the ladder ends. Either it goes to a human for a judgement call, formal recovery, a payment arrangement, a write-off, or it stops.

It has to end, for two reasons. The first is practical: a sequence that runs forever produces diminishing returns and irritated customers. The second is regulatory. Australian debt collection guidance sets expectations about contact frequency, and a ladder with no end becomes harassment, which is a conduct problem rather than a tuning problem. Contact limits count across every channel, not per channel, so voice, SMS and email all draw on the same allowance. More on that in compliance for automated calls.

The whole ladder

Three rules that make it work

1. It stops the moment the invoice is paid. Every rung checks first. Chasing somebody who paid yesterday costs more goodwill than the whole sequence earned.
2. Channel escalates, tone doesn't. The channel gets more direct as days pass. The tone stays professional at day 60 exactly as it was at day 7. Escalating tone is what turns a collections process into a complaint.
3. Exceptions come out before it starts. Disputed invoices, contractual holdbacks and customers you'd rather ring personally get excluded up front, not after an awkward call. If your clients bill progressively, do the ledger split first.

Office Voice runs this ladder as one cadence: the written rungs, the calls at day 30 and 45, the hold when somebody promises, the resume when the date passes, and the stop when Xero marks the invoice paid. What reaches you is the exceptions, which is manage by exception.

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