The challenge
A small business that invoices other companies followed up its overdue invoices by hand: sending reminders, reading each customer’s reply, matching payments received against what was outstanding and deciding the next step. It was constant work that depended on someone having time to do it.
The solution
We set up a series of n8n workflows connected to an invoice base in Airtable. When an invoice falls due, the system sends escalating reminders by email, groups the invoices for the same customer and site, doesn’t chase at weekends and stops if there is a dispute or a pending review.
Customers’ replies are read by an AI model, which tells whether it’s a promise to pay, a payment already made, a disagreement over the amount or a request for documents. Depending on the case, it answers the customer with the right text or passes the case to someone on the team.
Another workflow checks the payments list exported from the company’s management software and marks invoices as paid. The team views outstanding invoices on a protected page, where each salesperson can take on the invoices they prefer to handle themselves.
Technologies
- n8n
- Airtable
- OpenAI
- Gmail
- Google Drive
- Python
- JavaScript
The result
The team no longer sends reminders by hand or reads every reply to sort it: the system does that and only passes on the cases that need human judgement. Paid invoices drop out of the reminder chain on their own.
The company can also see what it is owed whenever it wants, by customer and site, and gets an alert if any workflow fails.