Partly, and less than the marketing suggests. The collection arrangement is the measurable bit: 98.0% of invoices set to collect automatically get paid, against 90.8% of the ones you have to ask for (Adfin platform data). That gap is the arrangement working, not the reminders. Where automated reminders earn their place is that your follow-up then happens every time. Chasing by hand doesn't.
The short version
- The measurable gain comes from automatic collection, and not from automated reminders on their own.
- Set to collect automatically: 98.0% paid, 0.9% overdue. Collected on demand: 90.8% paid, 5.3% overdue (Adfin platform data).
- What automation honestly gives you is consistency: it still happens in the weeks you're too busy to chase.
- There's no reliable evidence for the best channel or send time, ours included.
- Automating reminders on an invoice you could have collected by mandate only solves half your problem.
What our own data shows
The comparison we can make from our own data is between invoices set to collect automatically and invoices collected on demand:
| Set to collect automatically | Collected on demand | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid | 98.0% | 90.8% |
| Went overdue | 0.9% | 5.3% |
Adfin platform data, requests created in the seven months to the end of January 2026.
That's a big difference and it's tempting to hand the credit to automation. It belongs somewhere else. Invoices in the first column usually have a direct debit mandate behind them, so what you're looking at is the effect of having agreed in advance how payment happens, and not the effect of sending reminders automatically.
So your question really has two halves. Automatic collection works, and the evidence for it is strong. Automated reminders are a separate claim, and the evidence there is weaker than most of the people selling them will tell you.
Where automation genuinely helps
Automation earns its place in four ways, and wording has nothing to do with any of them.
- Your chasing happens at all. Credit control usually falls over because the schedule depends on somebody remembering in a week that had other plans, and a system doesn't have busy weeks.
- Your follow-up becomes predictable, and that's easier on a relationship than sporadic chasing, because it arrives as routine and not as an accusation.
- It scales without you hiring anybody. Businesses affected by late payment spend an average of 86 hours a year chasing, on the Small Business Commissioner's figure, and that's the cost automation takes off you.
- It saves your judgement for the places you need it. Sending a reminder on day 8 needs none of it. Deciding what to do about the client who has ignored three of them needs quite a lot.
What the evidence can't tell you
You'll find confident claims about the best day, the best hour and the best channel for a payment reminder. Take them with a pinch of salt unless you can clearly see the data behind them.
We can't publish a general answer either, and the reason matters, because two different questions get treated as one.
Does some channel or hour work best across all businesses and all customers? That's a question about a population, and neither the public evidence nor our own reporting settles it, so any confident answer, ours included, is a guess.
Does your particular client respond better on one channel than another? That one you can answer from that client's own record: what they've replied to before, and how quickly they paid afterwards. It's a claim about one customer and not about everybody, which is why it holds up where the first one doesn't.
The shape of it is measurable, at least. The median customer-initiated payment arrives 53 hours after the request and 42.9% arrive inside 24 hours (Adfin platform data), so most of what you collect comes in soon after your request is seen. That argues for getting your request in front of the right person early, and not for optimising the hour you send it.
How to use automation well
The order to do this in is arrangement first, schedule second. Put your recurring work on a mandate, so your reminders are only handling what genuinely needs asking for. Automate the schedule for everything else, set it as the invoice goes out instead of once it's late, and open with a confirmation before the due date rather than a chase after it. Then keep the judgement calls yours.
Adfin sends your follow-ups over email, WhatsApp and SMS from your own domain and branding, on a schedule you set, and core credit control is included at no cost.
Where an agent differs from a schedule
Everything above is about scheduled reminders. Most products mean exactly that by automation: a fixed sequence, the same for every customer, sent on days you picked in advance. The verdict on it is the one already given. It takes away the risk that you never get round to chasing at all, and that's worth having, but there's no evidence it does more for you than a person doing the same thing reliably.
An agent works differently, and it's worth separating out. Instead of running one schedule for everybody, it picks the next action customer by customer against rules you set, and adapts to how that customer has behaved before. You decide which channels it can use, how persistent it's allowed to be, what it can do unsupervised and where you want to approve first.
That matters because of the gap this article keeps pointing at. There's no evidenced best channel or send time in general, so a fixed schedule is one guess applied to everybody. A system that learns your one client answers the phone while another only ever pays after a Friday statement isn't claiming a universal rule, it's working from what that customer has actually done.
What still holds is the finding underneath all of it: your measurable gain comes from automatic collection, and not from reminders of any kind, however they're sent.
Common questions
Do automated payment reminders actually work? They make your follow-up consistent, which manual chasing isn't, and that's a real gain. But the big measurable difference in our data comes from invoices being set to collect automatically, not from the reminders themselves.
Is automated chasing better than a person chasing? For the repetitive part, yes, because it happens reliably. For a client who has ignored several reminders, a person does better. The two aren't competing for the same work.
What's the best time to send a payment reminder? There isn't a reliable general answer. No dependable public evidence settles it and we can't publish one either, so treat a confident universal answer from anyone as a guess. Your particular client's own history of replies and payments usually tells you more.
Will automated reminders annoy my clients? Predictable follow-up tends to annoy people less than irregular chasing, because it reads as process and not as a complaint. Your tone and how often you send matter more than whether a person pressed send.
Should I automate reminders or set up direct debit? Direct debit first, where your client will agree to it, because it removes the payment decision instead of just shortening it. Automate reminders for everything you can't collect automatically.
How many automated reminders should I send? Enough that it reads as a pattern without turning into background noise, and change medium instead of repeating the same message. There's no evidenced optimal number.
Sources
- Small Business Commissioner — late payments research (accurate as of August 2026)
This article explains how credit control works and is not legal or financial advice. Last updated August 2026.
