Day 1 of 14 · AI in Trade Credit Control

Credit Control Is Ripe for AI

⏱ 5 min 📊 Beginner

Look at your aged debtors report right now. Every line on it is money your business has already earned — goods shipped, services delivered, invoices raised. And it's sitting in other people's bank accounts.

Credit control is the job of going and getting it back. And here's the thing most people miss: the work itself is mostly chasing, checking, and drafting. Writing reminder emails. Reading credit reports. Summarizing ledgers. Deciding who to call first. That is exactly the kind of work AI compresses from hours into minutes — which is why credit control is one of the most AI-ready jobs in the whole finance function.

What slow receivables actually cost

When invoices get paid late, three things quietly drain your business:

Cash gets tied up. Money stuck in receivables is money you can't use to pay suppliers, buy stock, or cover payroll. Businesses that are profitable on paper can still fail because the cash arrives too slowly.

Write-offs creep in. The longer an invoice ages, the harder it typically becomes to collect. An account that's slipped past ninety days is a very different animal from one that's a week late — and every eventual write-off comes straight off your bottom line.

The awkward-chaser problem. Most people hate chasing money. It feels confrontational, so the reminder email gets postponed, softened, or never sent. Meanwhile the customer — who often pays whoever asks most clearly and most persistently — pays someone else first.

None of this gets fixed by working harder. It gets fixed by chasing consistently, checking customers properly, and getting the paperwork right — and AI makes all three dramatically faster.

Knowledge Check

Why does the "awkward-chaser problem" cost businesses money?

A

Reminder emails are legally risky without a lawyer's approval

B

People delay or soften chasing because it feels confrontational, so customers pay more persistent suppliers first

C

Customers refuse to pay businesses that send reminders

D

Chasing only works when done by a dedicated collections agency

Chasing feels uncomfortable, so it gets put off — and customers under cash pressure typically pay the suppliers who ask clearly and consistently. Polite persistence wins, and AI makes that persistence nearly effortless to maintain.

A credit controller's week — with and without AI

Without AI: Monday morning disappears into the aged debtors report, scanning hundreds of lines and guessing who to chase. Each reminder email is written from scratch — or worse, postponed because finding the right firm-but-polite wording is draining. A new customer wants credit terms, so an hour goes into reading their filed accounts and a credit report. By Friday, half the planned chasers were never sent, and the riskiest account got the same gentle nudge as everyone else.

With AI: You paste an anonymized ledger extract into your AI assistant and get a summary of the biggest risks and a suggested chase order in minutes. The reminder ladder — friendly nudge, firm follow-up, formal warning — is drafted in your voice; you review, personalize, and send. The new customer's credit report becomes a one-page risk snapshot you can actually act on. The judgment is still yours. The grind isn't.

That's the whole model of this course: AI does the reading, ranking, and drafting. You make every decision — every credit limit, every escalation, every send.

Order-to-cash pipeline showing cash leaking at slow invoicing, no chasing, disputes, and write-offs, with AI patches fixing each leak

Cash rarely disappears in one place — it leaks a little at every stage. AI patches each leak, and small fixes compound into a visibly healthier bank balance.

Knowledge Check

In the "with AI" week, what stays firmly in the human's hands?

A

Only the phone calls, since AI can't speak

B

Data entry into the accounting system

C

Every decision: approving limits, choosing escalations, and reviewing and sending each email

D

Nothing — the AI handles the full collections cycle end to end

AI reads, ranks, and drafts — but a human approves every credit limit, decides every escalation, and reviews and sends every email. That division of labor is the compliance backbone of this entire course.

Where the next 14 days take you

Here's the roadmap. Days 1–5 cover the foundations: your AI toolkit and data-hygiene rules, AI-assisted credit checks, setting limits that fit, and getting applications and terms right before the first invoice. Days 6–10 are the collection engine: invoice hygiene, prioritizing who to chase, dunning emails that get paid, payment plans, and resolving disputes fast. Days 11–14 go up a level: spotting insolvency red flags early, DSO reporting and cash forecasting, and assembling your personal credit control playbook.

Every lesson gives you prompts you can use the same day — with synthetic examples, so you learn the technique without ever exposing real customer data.

One rule before we start, and it applies to every single lesson: AI assists, humans decide. No credit limit gets approved, no email gets sent, and no account gets escalated without a human — you — making the call.

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ChatGPT

online

I run credit control for a small wholesale business. Month-end chasing eats about two full days. Which parts could an AI assistant realistically take over?

Quite a lot of the grind — as long as you keep the decisions. Here's a realistic split: **AI can do the heavy lifting on:** • Summarizing your aged debtors report into "biggest risks first" • Drafting the whole reminder sequence — friendly, firm, formal — in your tone • Suggesting a chase order based on amount, age, and payment history • Turning call notes into follow-up emails and promise-to-pay logs **You keep:** • Reviewing and sending every email • Deciding who gets a call vs. a reminder vs. an escalation • Approving any payment plan or hold on supply One caution: anonymize the data first — use account codes instead of company names before pasting anything into a general-purpose chatbot. Done this way, most of those two days becomes review-and-send instead of write-from-scratch.

↻ Replay conversation

Your one action today

Open your aged debtors report and answer one question honestly: which three accounts worry you most, and when did you last chase each one? If the answer is "I'm not sure" or "not recently," you've just found the gap this course closes.

Tomorrow: your toolkit. Which AI assistant to use, the confidentiality rules for customer financial data, and three prompts that pay for the setup time immediately.

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Day 1 Complete

"Your cash is sitting in other people's bank accounts. AI helps you go get it — politely, and first."

Tomorrow — Day 2

Your Credit Control AI Toolkit

Tomorrow you'll set up your AI assistant, learn the confidentiality rules for customer data, and run three prompts that save time on day one.

Continue to Day 2 →