Direct debit
Credit control
Customer agents
Card payments
Xero integration
Clarity Counts migrated 165 Direct Debit mandates to Adfin in one move, with no disruption to clients, and brought average days paid late down from 40 to 4.
At a Glance
How Clarity Counts cut invoice payment delays from 40 days to 4
Clarity Counts is a Norfolk-based chartered accountancy practice with offices across Aylsham, Norwich, King's Lynn and Hunstanton, serving SMEs, business owners and corporates.
Managing Partner Liam McHugh moved the firm's Direct Debit book onto Adfin in August 2025, migrating 165 mandates from their previous provider in one go. Adfin now sits alongside Xero and Socket as part of the firm's core finance stack.
Before Adfin
After Adfin
Challenge
A credit control routine with a human ceiling, and 41 days of late payment
Before Adfin, Clarity Counts ran credit control the way most practices do: manually, and on office hours. Invoices were settled 41 days late on average as of October 2025, keeping cash flow tighter than Liam wanted at a firm already used to running lean.
Reviewing the debtor list each month meant working through a long roll call of clients sitting at 30, 60, even 90 plus days overdue, treated as business as usual rather than the exception.
On top of that sat the practical challenge of moving 165 Direct Debit mandates across from a previous provider, without disrupting a single client relationship in the process.
“You could have the best credit controller in the world, but they're not going to log on at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday and send a reminder email to a client to pay their invoice, because that's when we know they're making their payments normally or when they're normally checking things. Whereas AI within Adfin will do all of that. It will look at patterns, and it will remember the patterns, and it will learn from the patterns. No human can do that, especially not for the cost of what it's costing us for Adfin.”
Liam McHugh · Managing Partner, Clarity Counts
Solution
A simple migration, then credit control that never clocks off
A migration with zero disruption
Clarity Counts used Adfin's migration tool to move all 165 mandates over from their previous provider in one go, with a cutoff date agreed in advance. Nothing changed for clients: invoices still went out and were collected on the same cycle as before.
“We actually used that migration tool to move over from our previous provider to Adfin, and there was absolutely no impact on clients at all. They just carried on. They got their invoice, and it got collected 14 days after, like it had been previously. I think the only difference is it now says our name on the bank statement rather than the name of the provider, which is quite nice as well.”
Credit control that works while the team doesn't
Rather than relying on a person to remember when to chase, Adfin's AI learns each client's own payment habits, including when they're actually likely to check an email and pay, and reminds them accordingly, at any hour, any day of the week.
Fewer manual chases, a shorter debtor list
With reminders and collection running automatically, the team sends statements far less often and spends far less time chasing outside of Adfin. What used to be a long list of overdue clients reviewed every month is now a short one.
“The number of times we're having to chase outside of Adfin has reduced significantly. We don't send statements anywhere near as often. When we look at our debtors now at the end of every month, we're reviewing it, looking at the 2 or 3 rather than the long list of all of the clients that are over 30 days, over 60 days. It's now the exceptions have clients in that stage rather than the norm.”
Confidence to bring clients along
Having seen the impact on their own book, Clarity Counts now refers clients to Adfin directly, spotting the ones, like a physio practice raising 30 to 40 invoices a week, who stand to benefit most.
“If it's improved our days late from 40 days to 4, why would we not be recommending it to clients that have got higher debtor days than they should have?”
Results
From 40 days late to 4, and cash flow to match
Since moving to Adfin in August 2025, Clarity Counts has taken average days paid late from 41 in October 2025 down to 3 or 4 by July 2026, with recent cohorts settling early. The 165 mandates migrated at the outset have grown into more than 1,600 settled Direct Debits since, and collections by Direct Debit are up 5x over the same period.
The firm has collected roughly £342,000 through Adfin to date, including around £55,000 on card, with monthly volume growing from under £10,000 to between £50,000 and £65,000 a month.
“The old practice I was at, a lot of the offices lived in their overdrafts. And for me to know I've got the money saved up to pay the tax bill in January, I've got the money saved up to pay last quarter's VAT, the VAT that we've got so far, paying for the rebrand. I've got new laptops coming for the staff, and it's all being paid out of cash flow. It is because our debtors are a lot lower than they were.”