Five products are worth your time if you're buying AI-branded credit control software in the UK in 2026: Adfin, Chaser, Credit Hound, Kolleno, Paidnice. What separates them is how much machine learning is under the badge. Kolleno names Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Chaser publishes a prediction model and a drafting tool, Credit Hound offers "AI assistance" without a mechanism, and Paidnice makes no AI claim at all.
In this article
The short version
- Kolleno alone names its model provider: "Microsoft Azure OpenAI" and "OpenAI's GPT models". Its AI agent is gated to a tier whose two-seat minimum comes to £1,990 a month annually.
- Chaser's AI is two things: an "AI email generator" drafting replies to inbound debtor emails, and a Late Payment Predictor scoring your due invoices from 0 to 100%.
- Credit Hound's own words are "AI supported pre-emptive reminder" and chasing tailored for "frequency and urgency, with AI assistance", with no model or provider named.
- No AI claim appears on the Paidnice pages we read. You'd be buying a rules-and-triggers engine, and that helps you price the others.
- No independent study shows AI-written or AI-timed chasing collecting faster than a well-configured schedule, so every effectiveness figure here, ours included, comes from a vendor.
At a glance: five products and their AI claims
| Product | The AI claim, in the vendor's words | What that describes | Published price | Priced per |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adfin | Customer Agents picking the next action per customer inside rules you set | An agent working your own ledger, with you approving | 1.0% + 20p | Successful transaction |
| Chaser | "AI email generator", "AI debtor risk insights", "Payment prediction" | A language model drafting inbound replies, plus a risk score | "From $259per month" | Plan, by your own revenue band |
| Credit Hound | "AI supported pre-emptive reminder" | Help with tone and timing, mechanism unpublished | £20 to £82 per user a month | User, and which ledger you run |
| Kolleno | "AI Agents handle collections and reconciliation autonomously" | GPT models acting "all inside your rules" | "£ 650 per user/month" | User, with seat minimums |
| Paidnice | No AI claim on the pages we read | Rules and triggers | £49 a month | Plan plus invoice volume |
Claims and prices from each vendor's own pages. Listed alphabetically, because no independent UK ranking of AI credit control tools exists.
Three different jobs wear the same badge
Across these pages, "AI" covers three jobs. Prediction ranks your ledger by who looks likely to pay late, using machine learning over payment history: peer-reviewed work by Kureljusic and Metz on one German DAX-40 company's ledger of over a million invoices found neural networks suitable for predicting payment dates. Drafting writes or adapts your words with a language model. Sending decides that message two goes out on day seven, and in most of these products that part is a rules engine. What is agentic credit control? separates a schedule from an agent.
One vocabulary note: "agentic" appears in no UK credit control vendor's marketing we documented, across all five here plus the Xero and QuickBooks reminder features.
1. Adfin
A UK payments platform collecting by direct debit, card or open banking and chasing what's open, with an agent working your ledger inside limits you set.
What you get: Customer Agents choosing the next action per customer and learning that customer's pattern from their own record, with you approving what you've asked to approve. Chasing over email, WhatsApp or SMS from your own domain, plus late fees, instalment plans or payment retries, auto-reconciled to Xero or QuickBooks.
The commercial detail:
- Pricing: 1.0% + 20p per successful transaction, an industry tier at 1.5% + 20p, the Accountants and Bookkeepers Club at 0% + 20p, enterprise by agreement. Bank payments capped at £4. Cards add 1% (premium or EEA) or 2% (non-EEA), and direct debits over £2,000 add 0.15% on the amount above £2,000. No monthly fees, no minimum, no minimum contract, all published at adfin.com/pricing.
- Support: a UK-based team on email, WhatsApp, SMS and in-app, and no fee for a failed payment.
- Who it suits: you bill recurring work and want chasing and collection in one place.
- Limitation: no euro or dollar collection, no published condition for the 1.5% tier, no VAT line.
2. Chaser
A dedicated chasing platform with the widest escalation here, and the only one publishing automated calls.
What you get: email reminders, SMS, automated calls or in-app calling, with Care plans adding Chaser's own credit control staff, and Chaser Pay for cards, wallets or open banking.
Its AI claims, verbatim. The AI email generator "analyses debtor emails, drafts polite, payment-focused responses" and "detects intent (promise-to-pay, dispute, document request, etc.)". The generator drafts your inbound replies rather than writing your chases. The Late Payment Predictor "categorizes your due invoices into low, medium, or high-risk brackets" from the due date, the value and past payment behaviour, with Chaser's own caveat: "The accuracy of these predictions is contingent upon the quality of data, the sophistication of predictive models, and the specific variables considered". No model or provider is named for either.
The commercial detail:
- Pricing: US dollars only. Compact "From $259per month", Core "From $779per month", Complete "From $1169per month", Custom "From $1199per month", each cheaper annually, and Core + Care "From $2149per month". Eligibility runs on your revenue.
- Reviews: Xero App Store 4.98 out of 5 from 374 reviews against G2 4.3 from 70, plus Capterra UK 4.9 from 45 (user-reported). Either of the first two alone would mislead you.
- Who it suits: your inbox fills with debtor replies and you want calls in your sequence.
- Limitation: no price in pounds on the page you land on, and which plans include either AI feature isn't published.
3. Credit Hound
Collections management built first for the Sage ledger, published by Draycir and sold through Sage's own marketplace. Sage doesn't own it: the marketplace names "Draycir Ltd" as publisher.
What you get: automated collection paths with email reminders, a task list for your calls, dispute management, and payment links through the separately priced PayThem module.
Its AI claims, verbatim: an "AI supported pre-emptive reminder", and the ability to "tailor the frequency and urgency of your chasing communications, with AI assistance". Thinnest claim in the roster, with no model, provider or mechanism behind it, and Draycir's own page for the same software carries no AI claim at all. Both pages are live.
The commercial detail:
- Pricing: per user per month, by ledger. £20 on Sage Accounting or Sage 50, £51 on Sage 200 or Xero, £82 on Sage Intacct, with PayThem £38 a month. Credit Hound Professional, the on-premise product, is priced separately at "Full User: £135.00 per Month".
- Reviews: Sage UK Marketplace 5 out of 5 from 11 reviews (user-reported). Nine of the eleven are three or more years old, and the Capterra URL we tried 404'd.
- Who it suits: you run Sage 50 and want the cheapest published entry price here.
- Limitation: no SMS or automated calls on any page we read, no credit checking, and QuickBooks isn't named by either product.
4. Kolleno
The widest product here, covering receivables, payables, reconciliation, and the most specific about its AI.
What you get: AI follow-ups, payment matching, dispute prioritisation or risk detection, with an agent named Maestro that "understands plain language and executes immediately". GoCardless is named as a payments integration, the only published route to UK Bacs direct debit here apart from Adfin.
Its AI claims, verbatim: "AI Agents handle collections and reconciliation autonomously", built on "Microsoft Azure OpenAI" and "OpenAI's GPT models", where "Kolleno AI continuously learns from every transaction" and "AI models automatically refine themselves with your payment data and customer patterns". Note the hedge in the same copy: those agents work "all inside your rules", and Maestro "routes the right work" once you've set your credit policy. Naming a provider is more than anyone else here does, and so is the governance line: "Full audit trail on everything AI touches".
The commercial detail:
- Pricing: BusinessPay "£ 650 per user/month" or £545 annually. Business Plus "£ 1245 per user/month" or £995 annually, two-user minimum. Enterprise and Enterprise Plus are custom. Kolleno publishes turnover gates too: above £1m for BusinessPay, above £10m for Business Plus.
- Reviews: G2 4.9 out of 5 from 114 reviews, Capterra UK 5.0 from 8, Xero App Store 5.0 from 18, all user-reported.
- Who it suits: you're above £1m turnover and want payables in the same system.
- Limitation: the AI agent the homepage is built around is gated to Business Plus, so £1,990 a month for two seats annually, and the page warns of "extra charges" for integrations without pricing any.
5. Paidnice
A rules engine bolted onto Xero or QuickBooks, applying your reminders, late fees, interest or prompt-payment discounts automatically.
What you get: email and SMS reminders escalating until the invoice is paid, with payment plans, statements or a customer portal. Escalation to a phone call, a credit stop or a legal letter is assigned to a person on your team instead of made by the software.
On AI, what you can use is an absence: no AI claim appears on the Paidnice reminder software or pricing pages we read. That isn't a criticism. Configured rules are what most automation here amounts to, and Paidnice prices them as rules.
The commercial detail:
- Pricing: GBP beside USD. Essentials £49 a month covers "150 invoices per month", "600 emails per month" and two team members. Pro runs £74 at 300 invoices, £129 at 600, £199 at 1,000, £349 at 2,000, £479 at 3,000, £599 at 4,000. Extra entities £19 a month, SMS 5p, Custom from "From $999 USD per month". Your trial is metered as "your first 20 actions".
- Reviews: Xero App Store 5.0 out of 5 from 82 reviews, G2 4.8 from 13, all user-reported.
- Who it suits: your terms allow late fees and interest you'd rather not apply by hand.
- Limitation: it doesn't take the money, so your collection stays put. Sage arrives only on Custom, and part-payment behaviour isn't published.
What these vendors leave unpublished
Most comparison pages fill every cell. Several of these are empty on the vendors' own sites, and the gaps help you more than an estimate would.
| Product | Published | Not published |
|---|---|---|
| Adfin | Rates, the £4 cap, card uplifts, the high-value direct debit uplift | VAT, who qualifies for 1.5% instead of 1.0% |
| Chaser | Four plans, staffed Care plans, revenue bands, tier gating | Any GBP price, which plans include either AI feature, Chaser Pay's fees, VAT |
| Credit Hound | Per-user rates on five ledgers, the PayThem add-on, the Professional price | What separates Cloud from Professional at £20 against £135, trial length on the vendor's own page, VAT |
| Kolleno | Four tiers, per-user rates, turnover gates, seat minimums | Enterprise rates, the integration and customisation surcharges, trial length, VAT |
| Paidnice | GBP beside USD, invoice bands, the entity add-on, the SMS rate | The GBP price of the Custom tier, whether reminders stop on a part payment, UK VAT |
Kolleno's AI agent is the most substantive here and the hardest to buy. AI Agent Support is a Business Plus feature at "£ 1245 per user/month" with a two-user minimum, so your entry cost is £2,490 a month monthly or £1,990 annually, on Kolleno's own arithmetic.
Chaser prices in US dollars. Its page carries a country selector listing the United Kingdom, and both of our reads returned USD, so your cost in pounds needs an assumption we won't make for you.
Credit Hound's price depends on your ledger, so any single figure is wrong for most readers: £20 per user a month on Sage 50 against £51 on Xero, and £135 per full user for Credit Hound Professional, with neither page explaining the difference.
And no vendor here publishes an accountant price. All five have a partner route, and every one is a form and a call: no percentage, no per-client rate, no wholesale rate. Paidnice's £19 per entity a month is your only per-client arithmetic, and it isn't badged as an accountant price. No pricing page here carries an effective date either, so treat every figure as a snapshot. Nor can you rank these five by price: Kolleno charges per user with seat minimums, Paidnice meters invoices, Credit Hound charges by ledger, Adfin charges on collection, and Chaser's figures aren't in pounds. No vendor here states a UK VAT position either, and Paidnice comes closest by addressing New Zealand GST.
Where the effectiveness numbers come from
When a page tells you AI chasing collects money some number of days faster, ask who measured it.
We went looking, and came back with very little. No published study, in any jurisdiction, compares AI-written with human-written payment reminders, tests AI-chosen send timing on commercial invoices, or tests channel choice for B2B chasing. What exists is a field experiment on Australian business tax debts, run by Gillitzer and Sinning at ANU, where a reminder letter raised the probability of payment by roughly 25 percent against sending nothing and moving it earlier inside a three-week window prompted faster payment without changing whether payment arrived, plus the forecasting paper above. Whether a model choosing your wording or your send hour collects anything sooner has not been measured in public.
So every effectiveness figure in this category comes from a vendor, ours as much as anybody's. The reductions in days sales outstanding quoted across enterprise receivables marketing carry no published method, and in the one case we chased, the superscript on the page resolved to no footnote. Do automated payment reminders actually work? has what the evidence supports.
Capability is what you can hold a vendor to on a demo: whether it learns one of your customers' patterns, caps how often it contacts anybody, keeps an audit trail, and stops before an escalation you'd want to approve. A days-faster number you can't check.
How to choose
| Your situation | Start here | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You want your chasing and your collection on one contract | Adfin | Direct debit, cards or open banking on one rate, with an agent working your ledger |
| Your inbox fills with debtor replies | Chaser | Its AI drafting is aimed at inbound messages, and calls are in the sequence |
| You run Sage 50 | Credit Hound | £20 per user a month, native to your ledger |
| You want payables and receivables in one system | Kolleno | The widest scope here, and the only named model provider |
| You want late fees and interest applied automatically | Paidnice | Published rules for interest, fees or prompt-payment discounts |
| You want the model provider named before you buy | Kolleno | "Microsoft Azure OpenAI" and "OpenAI's GPT models", in its own words |
| You'd rather pay for rules than for a model | Paidnice or Credit Hound | The lowest published prices in the roster |
How we compared these tools
Every price came from the vendor's own page, and each of those pages is listed in the sources below so you can check it. Vendors appear alphabetically, because no independent UK ranking of AI credit control software exists and a numbered order would imply one. Where a vendor publishes nothing we've said so instead of estimating, and where two of its pages disagree you get both. No pricing page here carries an effective date, so re-check before you buy.
The AI claims are quoted verbatim from the vendors' own pages, and we've described what that wording supports and no more. Where no claim appears, we say none appears on the pages we read, since an absence on a website isn't proof of an absence in a product.
Review scores are third-party, quoted with the platform and the count, and labelled user-reported. Where two platforms disagree sharply you get both, as with Chaser's 4.98 from 374 next to its 4.3 from 70. Where a score rests on one or two reviews you get the count and no score. And no effectiveness figure appears anywhere on this page, for any product including ours.
Want your chasing and collection costed together? Book a demo or see Adfin pricing.
Common questions
Which credit control tools actually use machine learning? On published claims, Kolleno and Chaser. Kolleno names "Microsoft Azure OpenAI" and "OpenAI's GPT models"; Chaser publishes a Late Payment Predictor scoring your due invoices from payment history, plus an AI email generator for inbound replies. Credit Hound claims "AI assistance" without a mechanism, and Paidnice makes no claim at all.
Does Paidnice use AI? No AI claim appears on its reminder software or pricing pages. You'd be buying a rules-and-triggers engine from £49 a month, which is useful when you weigh it against a tool charging you for a model.
How much does Kolleno's AI agent cost? AI Agent Support is a Business Plus feature at "£ 1245 per user/month", or £995 per user annually, with a two-user minimum. So £2,490 a month monthly, or £1,990 annually, and Kolleno publishes a turnover gate of above £10m for that tier.
Is there evidence that AI chasing gets invoices paid faster? Nothing independent. No published study compares AI-written with human-written reminders, or tests AI-chosen timing on commercial invoices. Research supports a reminder being worth roughly 25 percent against sending nothing, so any days-faster figure you're shown came from a vendor.
Which of these publishes a UK price? All except Chaser: Adfin, Credit Hound, Kolleno, Paidnice publish GBP figures. Chaser's page serves US dollars to a UK visitor and we haven't converted it. Not one of the five publishes an accountant price, and no pricing page carries an effective date.
Is Credit Hound a Sage product? Draycir publishes it, and Sage's own marketplace names "Draycir Ltd" as publisher. Credit Hound is sold through that marketplace and built first for the Sage ledger, and your price depends on your ledger: £20 per user a month on Sage 50 against £51 on Xero.
Sources
- Journal of Applied Accounting Research, Kureljusic and Metz on machine learning for payment date prediction (accurate as of August 2026)
- Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, ANU, nudging businesses to pay their taxes, does timing matter (accurate as of August 2026)
- Chaser, AI email generator (accurate as of August 2026)
- Chaser, Late Payment Predictor (accurate as of August 2026)
- Chaser, pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Credit Hound Cloud, home (accurate as of August 2026)
- Credit Hound Cloud, packages and pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Kolleno, AI agent (accurate as of August 2026)
- Kolleno, pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Paidnice, pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Paidnice, reminder software (accurate as of August 2026)
- Sage UK Marketplace, Credit Hound Professional for Sage 50cloud (accurate as of August 2026)
Adfin is one of the products compared in this article, and Adfin publishes it. All pricing is each vendor's own published pricing; no pricing page carries an effective date and vendors change their prices, so check before you commit. AI claims are quoted from the vendor's own pages. Review scores are third-party and quoted with their counts. No independent study of AI-written or AI-timed chasing exists, so no effectiveness figure is quoted for any product here, ours included. Last updated August 2026.
