Wild Bookkeeping is Penny Allard’s cloud-first practice for small businesses that want clarity without the jargon. Her newsletter, Balance Sheets and Beaches, mixes practical bookkeeping tips and software insights with wild swimming updates, sustainability ideas, and a reminder that business isn’t just spreadsheets.
Penny was one of our first Adfin customers, meeting the team back in July 2024. Today, Wild Bookkeeping uses Adfin across their invoicing workflow, sharing payment links through WhatsApp for one-off payments and using Adfin’s built-in reminders for quick nudges when clients need a prompt.
Problem: Invoices and generic email reminders were getting lost
Penny’s clients value her work. The issue wasn’t unwillingness to pay - it was attention.
“I know what it's like. You've got hundreds of emails on your phone, and that invoice comes in and the invoice just gets buried”
Penny described the cycle perfectly:
- A client sees an invoice email on their phone
- They think “I’ll do that later”
- The email gets marked as read
- By the time they’re back at a desk, it’s buried and the payment doesn’t happen
Solution: WhatsApp links to get invoices seen (and paid) faster
Penny realised her clients were most responsive on WhatsApp. Many of them run their businesses from their phones, and a message there gets noticed faster than another email in an already busy inbox.
She’d already seen this in other parts of her work. If she urgently needed a signature, an email could sit unread for days, but a WhatsApp message often got a quick reply.
So she applied the same to getting paid.
“Being able to send invoices by WhatsApp, they get seen and they get noticed. I now get paid much, much quicker when I can send the payment links or the invoices by WhatsApp.”
In Adfin, Penny set up a customised workflow to use Whatsapp for her invoice reminders, so the follow-ups go out automatically without her needing to nudge every time. And because every Whatsapp message includes the payment link, clients can see the reminder, and pay in a single click.
Results: debtor days down by more than 50%
Since adopting Adfin, and using WhatsApp links as her preferred reminder channel, Penny has reduced her debtor days by over 50%.
She didn’t need to chase more. She just used Adfin’s different channel reminders (email, WhatsApp and SMS) to reach clients where they actually pay.
What to take from Penny’s approach
- Send payment requests in the channel your customers use day-to-day
- Make it as easy as possible to pay
- Let Adfin do the hard work for you? We’ll show you how you can put your invoices on autopilot
