The unpaid invoice agent: every overdue invoice followed up, nothing sent outside your rules

The problem it removes

Late payment is rarely about bad clients. More often, nobody had time to send the reminder, or the first reminder went out three weeks late, or it was so stiff that a good client felt insulted. The result is cash sitting with your clients and an owner who spends Friday evening going through a spreadsheet.

The rules in France make timing matter. Service-public.fr explains that, between professionals, the default payment term is 30 days after delivery or performance, and that contracts can agree up to 60 days from the invoice date or 45 days end of month. Late payment penalties apply from the day after the due date, at a minimum of three times the legal interest rate, and a fixed indemnity for recovery costs is due for each late invoice. These amounts must appear in your terms and on your invoices. An agent that knows your due dates can apply your terms consistently.

How it works, step by step

1. Connect: the agent reads invoices, due dates, amounts and payment status from your invoicing tool. No double entry.
2. Agree the policy: for example a friendly note a few days before the due date, a reminder after it, a firmer message later with the penalties stated in your terms, then a person. You decide the stages and words.
3. Draft and send: each reminder uses the invoice number, amount, due date and the name of the person you deal with. In the first weeks, everything runs in dry-run: you see what would have been sent.
4. Read replies: a dispute, a question, a promise to pay or an out-of-office reply pauses the sequence for that invoice.
5. Hand over: sensitive cases go to the person you named, with the full history.
6. Report: a short daily list and a monthly view of what is overdue and for how long.

What it does, and what it never does

What it plugs into

Electronic invoicing is changing the plumbing in France. Service-public.fr states that from 1 September 2026 every company must be able to receive electronic invoices, and that large companies and mid-sized companies (ETI) must also issue them; small companies and micro-businesses must issue them from 1 September 2027. Invoices flow through approved platforms, which also track their lifecycle. We connect the agent to whatever your platform exposes, so it reads the same status your accountant sees.

• Your invoicing or accounting software, through its API or regular exports.
• Your email account, to send from your address and read replies.
• Your bank or payment platform, where available, to see when a payment arrives.
• Your CRM or team chat, to hand a case to a person.

What we already run ourselves

We have not run this agent for a client yet; here is what it is built from. Our own operations already rely on agents with the same guards: an email triage that sorts our founder's mailbox every 2 hours (moves and labels, never deletes), a morning brief, a night-ops review, servers checked every 5 minutes, and a daily SEO routine whose automatic checks refuse changes that break its rules. Every one has a cap, a dry-run mode, an off switch and a log.