Chasing overdue payments is easier when you can see who owes you, for how long, and what to do next on one screen. This guide shows how to use Money to Collect in Aicountly Billing to age your receivables, draft a reminder, record a receipt and export the list for a review.
What Money to Collect shows
Money to Collect lists every outstanding customer bill, with headline figures and an ageing chart above a searchable, filterable, sortable and paged table. Billing keeps no receivable of its own. Every amount comes from Smart Books, read when the page loads, so the screen and your books cannot drift apart.
The same screen, with the supplier side's wording, powers Money to Pay. If you pay suppliers on a schedule, our guide to the Section 43B(h) 15 and 45 day rule explains why that side matters before year-end.
How the ageing buckets work
Bills fall into six buckets, in the order of concern:
- Not yet due
- 1–30 days overdue
- 31–60 days overdue
- 61–90 days overdue
- Over 90 days overdue
- No due date
Age is counted from the due date, not the bill date. A bill on 60-day terms raised 45 days ago is not overdue, so you will not ring a customer who is still within terms. A bill with no due date gets its own bucket instead of hiding under “not yet due”, because an undated bill may be months late and is easy to forget.
Click a bucket to see only those bills. Your filters live in the page address, so you can bookmark or share a filtered view and the browser's back and forward buttons work as you would expect.
A weekly collection routine
- Start with the oldest buckets. Open 61–90 days and Over 90 days. These are the bills where a phone call usually beats another message.
- Check the undated bills. Add due dates to future invoices so they land in a proper bucket. Our debtors ageing routine covers the monthly review that goes with this.
- Work customer by customer. Filter to one party to see every open bill they have.
- Act on the row. Each row offers a receipt, a reminder and the party statement.
- Export the rest. Download the current view as a CSV file if you want to share the list with a partner or your CA.
Drafting a reminder
“Draft a reminder” builds a short, polite message from the figures on screen: the overdue amount, how many bills, the oldest bill and its due date, and the total outstanding. It asks the customer to pay or give a date.
The message is a draft for you to read. Billing does not deliver messages itself. You can copy the text or open it in WhatsApp and send it from your own account, so you always know whether the customer was actually contacted.
Recording a receipt
Choose “Mark as received” on a row, or select bills for one customer and use the receipt action. This opens the receipt screen, which posts the receipt to Smart Books. Nothing is marked settled by changing a status in the browser; Smart Books decides what is settled. Receipts are recorded against one party at a time, so select bills from a single customer.
Party statement and exports
The party statement gives you the customer's account in one view, which is useful when they dispute a balance. For reviews, export the current view or the ageing as a CSV file. If a view has nothing in it, Billing tells you there is nothing to export.
Who can do what
Billing profiles decide what each person sees. A counter biller lands on the biller desk, while an owner lands on the business overview. Receipts, reminders, statements and exports are separate permissions, so a profile that cannot send reminders sees that action marked unavailable instead of a button that fails.
A worked example
Suppose a customer has three open bills: one not yet due, one 12 days overdue and one 75 days overdue. (These numbers are only an illustration.) Filtering Money to Collect to that customer shows all three, with the oldest in the 61–90 days bucket. The reminder draft names the overdue total across the two late bills, mentions the oldest bill and its due date, and also states the full outstanding amount, so the customer sees both what is late and what is coming.
After the customer pays the 75-day bill, you record the receipt against that customer. Once Smart Books has posted it, the bill leaves the 61–90 days bucket and your headline figures change on the next read. That keeps the screen a faithful view of your books rather than a separate to-do list.
More help articles
For step-by-step instructions, see the help pages to draft a payment reminder for an overdue customer, record money received from a customer and export the Money to Collect list.
Key takeaways
- Ageing runs from the due date, so customers within terms are not chased.
- Undated bills have their own bucket; fix them by adding due dates.
- Reminders are drafts you send yourself, by copy or WhatsApp.
- A receipt is posted to Smart Books, which decides what is settled.
- Export the view as CSV for your weekly or monthly review.
If you already keep your books in Smart Books, Aicountly Billing gives you this collection view on top of the same figures, without a second set of records to maintain.
