← The Finance Station ~ dish 03 of 10 · the finance station

AR Follow-Up Drafting

When an invoice ages past terms, the next thing that happens is a follow-up. The follow-up is where tone matters more than most operators expect. A 30-day-past-due customer who is a good account needs a different email than a 60-day-past-due customer who already has relationship friction. The leverage is examples. Without your house examples, the station defaults to aggressive and loses accounts.

The job

AR follow-ups are the unsexy work that keeps cash flowing. An invoice goes out. Payment terms are 30 days. Day 35 hits. The CFO needs a follow-up sent. Same invoice. Day 45. A stronger reminder. Day 60. A near-final notice. Each one carries a different tone. A customer you’ve been working with for five years deserves a different approach than a new customer with a slow process.

Right now the CFO or a collections person drafts these. They write one. They copy and paste variations. They send. The customer either pays or doesn’t. When it’s a good account, sometimes the tone was too harsh and strained the relationship. When it’s a repeat offender, sometimes the tone wasn’t clear enough.

The station runs this recipe right when it reads the customer history, the aging day, the relationship pattern, and drafts the follow-up in the house tone. The CFO reads it. Sends it or tweaks it. The customer gets a letter that sounds like the company knows them.

The recipe

All seven ingredients still apply. The leverage on this dish is Examples (Ingredient #4). Without your actual AR follow-up examples labeled by tone and relationship type, the station has nothing to copy from. With examples, the station learns the difference between a good account that got busy and a serial slow-payer.

Training matters. Show the station how you sound when writing a gentle reminder to a good customer. How you sound when it’s the third notice. Show the station a follow-up to a new customer versus a long-term customer. House style is not “business formal.” House style is your voice. Context matters. The station reads the customer’s history, the number of past-due invoices, the relationship length, the invoice amount. Examples matter. This is where the leverage lives. Without examples, the station defaults to generic.

How to build it

  1. Pull ten AR follow-ups you wrote yourself. Five to good customers (early aging, good payment history, relationship friction is low). Five to problem customers (serial slow-payer, multiple aging notices sent already, higher friction). Label each one by tone and customer type.
  2. Categorize your examples by aging day. How you write a 10-day-past notice. How you write a 30-day past. How you write a 60-day past. The tone escalates. Show the station the pattern.
  3. Pipe in the customer AR aging report. The station reads which invoices are past terms and how far past. It reads the payment history for each customer.
  4. Pipe in the customer profile. How long has this customer been in the system. What’s their payment pattern. Are they a good account or a problem account.
  5. Define the tone guardrails. Aggressive collection emails never get sent without CFO review. A customer with a contract that specifies payment terms different from standard invoice terms needs to be flagged. Anything over 90 days escalates.
  6. Test on a mock run. Give the station five customers with aging AR. See what it drafts. You read each one. Is the tone right? Is it the voice you’d use? Adjust.
  7. Go live with escalation to the CFO. The station drafts the follow-up. The CFO reads it, approves or edits. When the CFO edits, that edit teaches the recipe. Over two weeks, the recipe sharpens.

What breaks it

  • Examples are too generic. The station never sees your house examples. It pulls the five most aggressive follow-ups from the internet and copies that tone. A good customer gets a threat. Relationship damaged. Always train on your own examples, not templates.
  • Customer profile missing. The station doesn’t know that this customer is your biggest account, or that they have a legitimate delay because of a budget cycle. Context tells the story. Read the customer history into the model.
  • Tone escalation is too strict. Day 10 overdue. The station uses the “final notice” tone. The customer gets insulted for being two days late. No escalation happens. The tone stays at “gentle reminder” until day 30. Then it moves.
  • Feedback loop death. The CFO rewords a draft. The reword never makes it back into the recipe. The station keeps drafting the way it learned on day one.

When it’s working

At week four, the station drafts 95 percent of AR follow-ups without CFO rewrite. The ones that do need a rewrite are usually because the customer situation is unusual, not because the tone is off. Customers respond faster to follow-ups because they feel addressed as individuals, not as account numbers. Bad-debt write-off goes down because the CFO catches payment issues earlier.

The signal that the recipe is sharp: the CFO can read the station’s draft and send it as-is without second-guessing the tone.

Monday Move

Pull ten AR follow-ups you wrote. Five to good customers. Five to problem customers. Label them. Pipe in your customer AR aging report. Define your tone escalation by aging day. The station is running on the next past-due invoice.

Dish 3 of 10 on the Finance Station. Build-note leverage: Examples (Ingredient #4).