How Cerith Williams is working towards credit control as a service"My theory with payments is make it as easy as possible to be paid. If clients or customers are not paying you, it's a choice. You're not creating any barriers."
Unity Accountancy is Cerith Williams' Xero-first practice for SMEs across every sector. He started it just over three years ago, then acquired another firm last year and grew from around 100 clients to 600 overnight, so a lot of what Cerith does is being figured out in the middle of real change.
Cerith was one of our first accountant customers and one of six accountants who helped us build the Credit Control for Accountants (CCfA) playbook. Today, he's using Adfin to build credit control into a productised service line for his clients, and he joined us on Episode 2 of The Adfin Brew to talk us through how he's doing it.
The most useful framing from the conversation was that credit control as a service isn't something you launch in one go. It's a ladder, and you climb it one rung at a time.
The ladder
The playbook structures CCfA in three tiers:
- Setup only. Get the client onto Adfin and leave them to it.
- Light management. Monitor in Adfin, send a monthly report, handle exceptions.
- Full credit control. Active monitoring, personalised chasing, escalation.
Cerith reframed it as a ladder he's been climbing for the last year. Rung one is running cleanly across his client base, he's working on what he calls rung 2.5 right now (which sits between light management and full credit control), and he's actively building toward rung three.
A lot of accountants stall before they start because they think they need to offer rung three on day one, but the whole point of the climb is that you build a service line by getting the first rung right, then the second, then the bits in between.
Rung one: getting clients onto Adfin
This is the easy entry point and where a lot of Cerith's clients sit. If a client has no way of collecting payments, he gets them on Adfin, and if they're already on Stripe or another direct debit provider, he moves them across so everything sits in one place.
Setup takes about five minutes: the client verifies their identity, connects to Xero, and the chasing kicks in automatically.
On charging for setup
When Cerith first joined the playbook conversations, he wasn't charging for this. His logic at the time was that it takes five minutes, so why would he charge? He's since changed his mind.
Unity now has a "software analysis and implementation fee" for any new client who isn't already on Xero or Adfin. £50 for a client paying £300-£400 a month is a token amount, but the principle matters.
"My mistake was doing it in front of the client. They knew it only took five minutes. If you're setting it up on their behalf, charge for it."
The value isn't really the five minutes, it's the late payment rate dropping from 63% nationally to 9% on Adfin. Worth flagging in the pitch: clients you onboard also get 25% off direct debit fees for their first 12 months, which makes the setup fee feel even fairer.
Rung two: personalised chasing
The middle rung is where the service starts feeling like a service.
Cerith uses Autopilot, Adfin's personalised chasing, to send chases from his practice's email domain, written in his tone of voice and signed as if they're coming from an accounts team. The accounts team doesn't technically exist, but the emails still do their job.
"We've had people apologising that they haven't paid their bill yet, even though the direct debit is going to be collected in the next couple of days. You'd never get that from an automated message."
Whether the chase comes from Adfin, your business, or a named person on your team is part of the conversation with the client. For single-person business owners with close client relationships, detachment often works better, but for everyone else, the human voice does more work.
Cerith made one point worth sitting with. He talked about how often business owners rewrite a chase email three or four times on a Tuesday morning, trying not to sound like they're chasing.
"Using their fourth or fifth draft, the version they'd actually send, we can tailor that into Adfin. It happens automatically. They're not sitting there staring at the screen rewriting it."
It's a service the client can feel, and it's something the client can't easily do for themselves.
Rung 2.5: where Cerith is now
This is the rung Cerith invented for himself, and it's where the climb gets interesting.
Full credit control means someone in your practice phones debtors, handles escalation, takes complaints, and manages legal referral, which requires real internal structure, dedicated headcount, and client care training. It's a serious operational lift.
"From a value perspective, you don't want your qualified accountants phoning people chasing money. And delegating it to a junior member of staff can be reasonably dangerous. They need the understanding, they need the client care."
So Cerith is building toward rung three in stages. His 2.5 combines Adfin running automated and personalised chases in the background, light touch human follow-ups from his team via their own email when needed, and a partnership with local law firms for the escalation step.
That last point is the most interesting move. The playbook flags legal escalation as something practices need to decide separately, either through in-house capability or a partner, and Cerith's turned that into a business development opportunity. The credit control conversation has opened up new relationships with local law firms, which in turn is opening up other ways to collaborate.
From the client's perspective, Unity is still managing the whole problem, and the legal piece just happens to be delivered through a partner. The service line ends up looking bigger than what they're staffing in-house.
On white-labelling
The playbook recommends white-labelling the service: lead with the outcome, not the tool.
Cerith's take is that it depends on the client.
"No one really needs to know how you do things. They just want the end goal. They've got a problem getting paid, they want to get paid quicker. No one really cares about the middle."
For tech-curious clients, talk through the stack. For everyone else, sell the outcome.
The one thing he flagged is that clients will feel whether it's working. If cash is coming in quicker and they're not stressing about payroll, they know. Dashboards and KPIs back it up, but the felt experience does most of the trust-building.
Where Cerith thinks accountants should start
We asked him what advice he'd give to an accountant who wants to launch this but isn't sure where to begin, and his answer wasn't "sign up a client". It was to get your own practice onto Adfin first.
"Take your bad paying clients and put them through Adfin. Get the automatic chasing rather than relying on the accounting software's three reminders."
There are no minimums or platform fees and you only pay when you get paid, so putting your own practice on it costs nothing and teaches you the workflow. Once you've used it for a couple of months, picking your first client to onboard is a much smaller leap.
£2,500 collected from invoices that were a year overdue
Cerith had a client with historical invoices from 2024 that hadn't been paid, and he gave them a choice: clear them up first, or put them through Adfin.
They put them through Adfin, the automatic chasing kicked in every three days, and the debtors gave up and paid.
"We collected about £2,500 that was due from 2024."
For context, at Adfin's 1% + 20p per payment, that's under £30 to collect £2,500, where a debt collection agency would have charged anywhere from 6% to 35%.
And because every client Cerith sets up on Adfin counts as a referral, he's building referral benefits while running the service, including discounts on his own direct debit fees and £100 Amazon vouchers for both him and the client once they pass £1,000 through Adfin.
What to take from Cerith's approach
- You don't have to launch full credit control to launch a service. Rung one is a real offer.
- You don't need to build everything in-house. Find a partner for the bits you don't want to deliver.
- Start with your own practice. Use Adfin for your own credit control first, then expand from there.
Want to launch credit control as a service at your practice?
Download the Credit Control for Accountants playbook for the full guide on tiering, pricing, positioning, and setting clients up, or book a call and we'll walk you through where to start.
Episode 3 of The Adfin Brew is next with Paul Barnes (CASS).
