Credit control
14 min read
September 28, 2026

Best credit control software for businesses in 2026

Adfin team

If you're buying UK credit control software in 2026, the shortlist worth reading is Adfin, Chaser, Kolleno, Paidnice, Satago and Trove, plus the reminder features already inside Xero and QuickBooks. Entry prices run from nothing to £650 per user a month, and the units aren't comparable, so start with what each one charges for.

In this article

The short version

  • Four of the eight publish a GBP rate card you can read in full: Adfin, Kolleno, Paidnice, Satago.
  • Chaser publishes its card in US dollars on the page you land on from the UK, so your cost in pounds needs an assumption we won't make for you.
  • Trove's own site publishes one figure, "From £50 a month". Its tiers exist only on two app-store listings, and they disagree by £20.
  • Satago's £45 Basic caps email reminders at 100 a month, and Kolleno's AI agent starts on a tier with a £1,990 monthly minimum.
  • Nobody except QuickBooks states a VAT position, and not one pricing page carries an effective date.

At a glance: eight options compared

Prices from each vendor's own pages, and the Xero reminder facts from Xero Central. Alphabetical, because no independent UK ranking exists.

What these vendors don't publish

Most comparison pages fill every cell. Half of these numbers aren't there, and the gaps help you more than our estimate would.

Four of those gaps deserve saying out loud.

Chaser prices in dollars. Its page carries a country selector listing the United Kingdom, and two separate reads both returned US dollars. We haven't converted for you, because a conversion hides an FX spread inside an invented number.

Trove publishes one number, "From £50 a month". Its tiers come from a Xero App Store listing at £50, £135 and £265 a month, and a Capterra listing putting Advanced at £285 plus a custom Ultimate tier. Both are vendor-supplied, read the same day, £20 apart at the top.

An allowance can matter more than a headline. Satago's £45 Basic includes "100 email reminders per month", so if you chase each invoice three times you run out at around 33 invoices a month, which is arithmetic on their own figures. Kolleno's AI agent, the thing its homepage is built around, sits on Business Plus at "£ 1245 per user/month" with a two-user minimum, so £1,990 a month annually.

And two things nobody will tell you. No accountant or partner price appears on any of these sites, because every partner programme is a form and a call. VAT is stated by Intuit alone, on its Payments fees. And no pricing page carried an effective date, so treat every figure as a snapshot.

1. Adfin

A UK payments platform that collects by direct debit, card or open banking, then chases what's unpaid.

What you get:

  • One rate across methods, with the £4 cap on your bank payments
  • Chasing over email, WhatsApp or SMS from your own domain
  • Instalment plans, late fees and free retries with a card fallback

The commercial detail:

  • Pricing: 1.0% + 20p per successful transaction, capped at £4, plus 0.15% above £2,000 on a direct debit. Cards add 1% (premium or EEA) or 2% (non-EEA). An industry tier runs at 1.5% + 20p, the Accountants and Bookkeepers Club at 0% + 20p. No monthly fee or minimum.
  • Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 out of 5 from 12 reviews (user-reported).
  • Who it suits: you bill recurring work and want your 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, and the only one here publishing automated phone calls.

What you get:

  • Email reminders, SMS, automated phone calls and in-app calling
  • Chaser Pay for cards, wallets and open banking, plus Care plans adding Chaser's own staff
  • An AI email generator drafting replies to inbound debtor emails, and a Late Payment Predictor scoring invoices 0 to 100%

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 own annual 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 ledger justifies staffed escalation and you want calls in your sequence.
  • Limitation: you can't get your cost in pounds from the page you land on. Which plans include the AI features isn't published, and Bacs isn't on the Chaser Pay page.

3. Kolleno

Receivables and payables in one platform, with reconciliation alongside, for larger finance teams.

What you get:

  • AI agents handling follow-ups, payment matching and dispute prioritisation, with Microsoft Azure OpenAI and GPT models named
  • GoCardless named as a payments integration, the only published route to UK Bacs direct debit here

The commercial detail:

  • Pricing: BusinessPay "£ 650 per user/month" or £545 annually. Business Plus is "£ 1245 per user/month" or £995 annually with a two-user minimum, and Enterprise is custom. Kolleno publishes turnover gates too: over £1m for BusinessPay, over £10m for Business Plus.
  • Reviews: G2 4.9 out of 5 from 114 reviews, Capterra UK 5.0 from 8 and the Xero App Store 5.0 from 18 (user-reported). Its Trustpilot page holds one review.
  • Who it suits: you're above £1m turnover and want payables in the same system.
  • Limitation: the AI agent it's all sold on starts at £1,990 a month for two seats, and the page warns of "extra charges" for integrations without pricing them.

4. Paidnice

A rules engine bolted onto Xero or QuickBooks: reminders, late fees, interest charging and discounts, applied automatically.

What you get:

  • Email and SMS reminders that escalate until the invoice is paid
  • Payment plans, automated statements and a customer portal

The commercial detail:

  • Pricing: GBP published 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 and £599 at 4,000. Extra entities are £19 a month, SMS is 5p, and Custom starts "From $999 USD per month" with no GBP figure.
  • Reviews: Xero App Store 5.0 out of 5 from 82 reviews, Trustpilot 4.7 from 25 on the Australian mirror and G2 4.8 from 13 (user-reported).
  • Who it suits: your terms allow late fees you'd rather not apply by hand, and you're on Xero or QuickBooks.
  • Limitation: it doesn't take the money, so your collection stays where it is. Sage arrives only on Custom, and part-payment behaviour isn't published.

5. QuickBooks built-in reminders

Three reminder slots inside QuickBooks Online, running on one account-wide template.

What you get:

  • Up to three reminders: Intuit's help article says "You can create second and third reminders as needed"
  • Scheduling "up to 90 days before or after the invoice due date", the widest window in this set

The commercial detail:

  • Pricing: included in your QuickBooks subscription. Payments is a separate add-on at "1% + VAT, cap £4" for Pay by Bank and "1.2% + 20p exc VAT" for Pay by Card, and it isn't available on QuickBooks Sole Trader.
  • Reviews: none quoted. A score for the whole accounting package tells you nothing about the reminders.
  • Who it suits: you're on QuickBooks and three emails on one template covers what you need.
  • Limitation: email only, one template for every customer, and reporting is a "(Reminded)" flag. Neither help article addresses a part payment, and Pay by Bank carries no reusable mandate.

6. Satago

Chasing and credit checking with invoice finance behind it. Its parent is TruFin plc; Sage is a partner, not an owner.

What you get:

  • Automated emails, on schedules you can adjust customer by customer
  • Credit scores and suggested limits, with the bureau unnamed
  • Invoice finance with "up to 90% advance rates", the thing separating Satago from everything else here

The commercial detail:

  • Pricing: "£45 per month or £450 billed annually" for Basic, "£80 per month or £800 billed annually" for Premium, "£200 per month or £2000 billed annually" for Platinum. Basic includes 25 credit reports and "100 email reminders per month" with no SMS. Premium adds unlimited email, 100 SMS per rolling 30 days and card acceptance.
  • Reviews: Capterra UK 4.5 out of 5 from 4 reviews and G2 5.0 from one dated April 2020 (user-reported). Five in total.
  • Who it suits: you want funding against your ledger as well as chasing.
  • Limitation: your Basic allowance runs out at roughly 33 invoices chased three times a month, and Satago's product page names no payment method while its pricing page sells card acceptance.

7. Trove

Email chasing with a shared debtor board, from a company incorporated on 6 February 2025.

What you get:

  • Due date reminders and statements, sent from your own email
  • A team-wide Kanban board for debtor visibility, plus bounce monitoring
  • Template variation, described as "Vary sentences using AI to avoid identical weekly emails"

The commercial detail:

  • Pricing: "From £50 a month" is the only figure on Trove's own site. Its Xero App Store listing gives Essential £50, Integrated £135 and Advanced £265 a month, and Capterra puts Advanced at £285.
  • Reviews: Xero App Store 5.0 out of 5 from 10 reviews (user-reported). Capterra shows "Based on 0 user reviews" and no G2 listing was found.
  • Who it suits: you're a small Xero or FreeAgent business and want your chasing visible to your team.
  • Limitation: no payment collection is published, so it chases and stops. No QuickBooks and no Sage, and no SMS, phone or letter capability on any page we read.

8. Xero built-in reminders

Five email reminder slots in the ledger you already bill from, at no extra cost.

What you get:

  • Up to five reminders per organisation, three set up by default, presets at 7 days, 14 days and 21 days
  • Each set as days "due in" or "overdue by", 0 being the due date itself
  • A link reaching cards, digital wallets, PayPal or Bacs direct debit through a provider, something several paid tools here have no answer for

The commercial detail:

  • Pricing: included in every Xero plan. The UK plan prices published on the access date were promotional first-six-month rates, so they stay out of here. The reminder facts come from Xero Central.
  • Reviews: none quoted, for the same reason as QuickBooks.
  • Who it suits: one polite sequence suits all your customers and your bank feed is connected.
  • Limitation: one schedule covers your whole ledger, no automatic stop on a part payment beyond an account-wide minimum balance, and a missed reminder doesn't catch up. Xero points at its App Store "for apps that allow more advanced invoice reminder options".

Why these prices can't be compared side by side

The headline figures measure five different things, so ranking by them would rank how each vendor chose to bill you rather than what you'd pay.

Kolleno's £650 is per user and Satago's £45 covers your whole organisation. On one seat that's a ratio of about 14 to 1, and it widens once the two-seat minimum on Business Plus applies.

Paidnice meters invoices, so its ladder from £49 to £599 moves with your monthly count, and a comparison at 200 invoices reorders at 2,000. Pick your volume first.

Adfin charges on collection instead of by the month, so there's no like-for-like row. 1.0% + 20p on a £400 invoice is £4.20 however often you chase it, and a quiet month costs you nothing where a subscription costs the same.

Sold as credit control, built for something else

A few products come up in this search and turn out to be a poor fit for you, or wrongly described nearly everywhere.

Credit Hound isn't a Sage product. Draycir publishes it, and Sage's own marketplace names "Draycir Ltd" in the publisher field. It's a strong Sage-first tool, and Credit Hound Cloud is the cheapest published entry price in the category at £20 per user a month on Sage 50 against £51 on Xero. QuickBooks isn't supported by either Credit Hound product on any page we read, so if you run QuickBooks it's out.

Sage doesn't own Satago either. Theirs is a partnership, expanded on 1 July 2026, under which Sage embeds its accounting technology into Satago's finance platform. Satago's parent is TruFin plc, and Companies House shows TRUFIN SOFTWARE LIMITED carrying the previous name SATAGO SOLUTIONS LIMITED. Finextra has reported that Lloyds Bank terminated its Satago contract after investing £5m for a 20% stake, trade press rather than a filing.

How to choose

How we chose these tools

Every price came from the vendor's own page, linked at the end so you can check it yourself, apart from the Xero reminder facts, taken from Xero Central. Where a vendor publishes nothing we've said so instead of estimating, and where two of its pages disagree you get both. Vendors appear alphabetically, because no independent UK ranking exists and a numbered order would imply one.

Review scores are third-party, quoted with their counts and labelled user-reported. App-store scores here run hotter than G2's, so Chaser's 4.98 from 374 appears next to its 4.3 from 70. Where a platform holds one or two reviews you get the count instead of the score.

Want collection and chasing costed together? Book a demo or see Adfin pricing.

Common questions

What is the cheapest credit control software in the UK? The reminder features in Xero and QuickBooks cost you nothing beyond your subscription. Among paid tools, Satago's Basic at £45 a month is the lowest published GBP figure, though it caps email reminders at 100 a month. Credit Hound Cloud is £20 per user on Sage 50.

Which credit control tools publish a UK price? Four of them: Adfin, Kolleno, Paidnice, Satago. Chaser publishes a full card in US dollars on the page you land on from the UK. Trove shows only "From £50 a month", its tiers appearing on two app-store listings £20 apart.

Do these tools collect the payment as well as chasing it? Some do. Adfin collects by direct debit, by card and by open banking, Chaser has Chaser Pay, Kolleno names GoCardless, and Satago's pricing page lists card acceptance. Paidnice sends you links without taking the money, Trove none.

Is Xero's built-in reminder feature enough? For plenty of businesses, yes. Five email slots cover a ledger where most of your customers pay and one sequence suits them all. You'd be buying longer sequences, other channels and per-customer schedules.

Do credit control software prices include VAT? Only Intuit says. Its Payments fees are published as "1% + VAT, cap £4" and "1.2% + 20p exc VAT". No VAT position appears on the Adfin, Chaser, Kolleno, Satago or Trove pages we read, and Paidnice covers New Zealand GST alone.

Which credit control tool can collect by direct debit? Adfin collects Bacs direct debit itself, Kolleno names GoCardless, and Xero's free reminders can carry a link reaching it through a provider. Chaser doesn't mention Bacs on its Chaser Pay page, and no mandate capability is published by Paidnice, Satago, Trove or QuickBooks.

Sources

Adfin is one of the products compared in this article, and Adfin publishes it. All pricing is each vendor's own published pricing, linked at the end; no pricing page carries an effective date and vendors change their prices, so check before you commit. Review scores are third-party and quoted with their counts. Last updated August 2026.

Adfin team