Three of the costs are documented and one is structural. You carry two contracts with two sets of exit terms, you reconcile twice, and Xero publishes invoice reminders to other apps as a single read-only on/off flag, so a chasing tool can't read or change the reminder schedule your ledger is already running. No independent research prices any of it, and knowing that is worth more to you than anyone's number.
In this article
The short version
- No independent, non-vendor study of the cost of running collection and chasing separately could be found. Every figure in circulation on it is a vendor's, ours included.
- Xero's API exposes invoice reminders as a single read-only on/off flag, so no third-party app can read your reminder schedule or change it.
- "22% of surveyed businesses said they spent staff time chasing late payments, on average 86 hours per business affected by late payment per year". Per business affected, and not per small business.
- At the £16.92 hourly labour cost used in the same report, 86 hours is about £1,455 a year. That arithmetic is ours; the report gives no per-business cost.
- Exit terms here run from a monthly rolling contract to a 24-month initial term, and two suppliers means two of them.
- Consolidating removes joins. Whether it collects more money is not something anyone has measured, so we won't claim it.
What nobody has measured
We went looking for independent research on what it costs you to run your payments in one system and your chasing in another. What came back was vendor content marketing: a credit management blog, payment processor comparison pages, a private bank's cash flow guide, and general pieces on the hidden costs of switching software. The one apparently independent result, an FSB page on switching payment provider, returned an empty body when we fetched it.
We couldn't find an independent figure, so any "£X per invoice" you've seen on this belongs to somebody selling you the alternative, and that includes us. What follows reasons from published documents and labels every step.
Two contracts, two sets of exit terms
Exit terms vary more than anything else here, and two systems means two of them.
At one end, GoCardless publishes no fixed minimum term, lets you end the agreement for convenience on written notice, and commits at clause 7.1 of its bank debit terms to helping you move, including entering into "a bulk change deed" and providing "a machine-readable list of each of your Customers and their Payment Scheme Mandate details". On published exit terms that is the best position in this market.
At the other end, one credit control vendor's published terms set a 24-month initial term, renewing in 12-month terms on 90 calendar days' notice, with fees described as non-cancellable and non-refundable. And one direct debit provider publishes no customer terms at all, a fact about its website and no guide to the term you would sign.
What holding two of these does to you:
- Two renewal dates and two notice periods that rarely align, so leaving one supplier can leave you paying the other for months.
- Two commercial conversations whenever you want to change something, and the longer term holds the better position.
- No published bulk change fee in either direction. We record that as unpublished and not as free, so get yours in writing.
Two reconciliations of the same money
Your collection provider pays you in batches and your ledger holds invoices, so somebody in your business breaks each payout back down to the invoices behind it. That work exists whether or not you run a chasing tool as well.
Your second system adds a third view of the same invoice. Your chasing tool reads your ledger, so it learns about a payment when the ledger does, and the ledger learns once you've reconciled the payout. Until then a paid invoice can still be inside a live chasing sequence, and the suppression most tools give you depends on your sync arriving before the next scheduled message. Nobody publishes how often that misfires and we haven't got a figure either.
The blind spot: your ledger's own reminders
This next one is structural, and it comes out of an API contract rather than anybody's marketing.
Xero's Accounting API publishes one endpoint for invoice reminders, /InvoiceReminders/Settings, and it is GET only. The response schema has exactly one property: Enabled, described as a "setting for on or off", type boolean.
So the whole programmatic surface of Xero's own reminders, as published, is a single read-only flag. An app can find out whether your reminders are on. It can't discover how many you have configured, at what offsets, with what wording, or whether any have gone out, and it can't add one, edit one or turn the feature off.
Xero's built-in reminders ship as three by default, cap at five, and apply across your whole organisation instead of per customer. Hold those two facts together and the consequence follows: leave Xero's reminders on, add a chasing tool, and you're running two chasing systems that cannot see each other. Your ledger doesn't know your tool's schedule and your tool can't read your ledger's. Neither vendor publishes this, because it only becomes visible when you read the reminder settings against the API contract.
Two limits on that. It describes the published API surface, so it isn't a claim that any particular app double-chases your customers, and it is specific to Xero's own reminders.
The 86 hours figure
One figure gets quoted in every conversation about chasing, usually with its qualifiers removed. Verbatim, from the Office of the Small Business Commissioner: "22% of surveyed businesses said they spent staff time chasing late payments, on average 86 hours per business affected by late payment per year" (page published 31 July 2025).
The research behind it is Late payments research: impact on the UK economy, published July 2025 by the Department for Business and Trade with the Office of the Small Business Commissioner, delivered by London Economics on a YouGov and IFF Research survey of 1,455 businesses, fieldwork 15 January to 7 February 2025. The 86 hours is Table 14, and the economy-wide total is 133 million hours a year.
Read it as 86 hours per business affected by late payment, among the 22% of surveyed businesses that reported chasing time, and not as 86 hours per small business. Most published uses drop both qualifiers.
The same report values staff time at £16.92 an hour, from ASHE wage data, in its Table 15 cost estimate. Multiply the two and 86 hours is about £1,455 a year. That multiplication is ours, on two figures published in the same report, and the report gives no per-business cost of its own.
And it measures chasing, not architecture. Nothing in it splits that time by how many systems a respondent used, so it says nothing about what your second subscription adds.
What a regulator found about switching cost
One piece of genuine non-vendor evidence on switching cost does exist, collected by a payments regulator.
In Direct Debit Facilities Management: Switching service provider (CP17/1, August 2017), the Payment Systems Regulator recorded evidence from one facilities management provider about "13 instances since April 2015 where it claimed that an outgoing FM provider refused to use the bulk change process. In six of these instances this led to the switch being abandoned." In the other seven the client had to obtain new mandates from its customers, "in some cases there were more than 10,000 of these". A sixth provider told the regulator that "sometimes the ceding [outgoing] provider delays data transfer to complicate the process or tries to impose fines or conditions on the client to put them off making the switch".
Now the hedges, and they matter more to you than the quotes do. This is 2017 evidence describing the rules as they stood before 1 January 2018, when the position changed and outgoing providers became required by scheme rules to co-operate with a bulk change. The 13 instances were submitted to a consultation by one provider, and the regulator's own wording records that the provider "claimed" them. The fines and conditions passage is a sixth provider's characterisation, quoted by the regulator. No published follow-up establishes what happened after the rule change, so nobody can tell you from evidence whether the problem went away.
The fair reading is narrow. A regulator intervened because switching was being obstructed, the scheme rules changed, and what the rules still don't reach is your contract. So read the exit terms on both of your systems before you sign either.
What consolidating fixes, and what it leaves alone
Start with what it doesn't do. Putting your collection and your chasing in one place doesn't make a customer pay you, and no evidence we hold or anyone else publishes shows that consolidation collects more money.
What it removes is joins. One reconciliation instead of two, one exit instead of two, and one record where your payment and your reminder can see each other, so a collection that succeeds ends the sequence without anybody marking it off.
The routine part of chasing is a scheduling problem more than a writing one, and it competes with everything else in your week, which is where those 86 hours go. That part transfers well to an agent working to rules you set: which channels it may use, how persistent it may be, and what it may do without asking you. Adfin's Customer Agents work from each customer's own record of previous messages and payment behaviour. What stays with a person is the judgement, the escalation, and the conversation where somebody explains they're in trouble.
Consolidation has its own price too, in flexibility and in concentrated risk. Can one platform do invoicing, direct debit and card payments sets that out.
Common questions
How much does it cost to run payments and chasing in two systems? No independent research answers that, and we could find none. What can be sourced is the exit terms on both contracts, the duplicated reconciliation, and the fact that a chasing app can't read your ledger's own reminder schedule. Any specific pound figure you see comes from a vendor.
Why can't my chasing tool see Xero's invoice reminders? Because Xero's API doesn't expose them. The reminder settings endpoint is read-only and returns one boolean saying whether reminders are on, so no app can read your schedule or wording, and none can turn the feature off for you.
Is the 86 hours a year figure per small business? No. The figure is 86 hours per business affected by late payment, among the 22% of surveyed businesses that reported spending staff time chasing. The research is DBT and the Office of the Small Business Commissioner, July 2025, delivered by London Economics on a survey of 1,455 businesses, fieldwork January and February 2025.
What is 86 hours of chasing worth in money? About £1,455 a year at the £16.92 hourly labour cost the same report uses. That multiplication is ours, on two of its published figures, and not a finding of the report.
Does consolidating payments and chasing get invoices paid faster? Nobody has measured it, so we won't tell you it does. What consolidation changes is the number of contracts, reconciliations and blind spots you maintain, and you can check each of those before you buy.
What should I check before merging the two? Both sets of exit terms, both notice periods, the migration route for your mandates, and whether the combined product covers the channels you need. Above a provider's own operational minimum, mandates move through the Bacs Direct Debit Bulk Change Process and your customers sign nothing new; below it they sign a fresh mandate. That minimum belongs to the provider quoting it, never to the scheme.
Sources
- Payment Systems Regulator — Direct Debit Facilities Management: switching service provider, CP17/1 (accurate as of August 2026)
- Office of the Small Business Commissioner — late payments research (accurate as of August 2026)
- GoCardless — bank debit terms (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero — OpenAPI specification 17.0.0 (accurate as of August 2026)
This article is information, not advice. The 86 hours figure and its basis come from the Office of the Small Business Commissioner's late payments research page and the July 2025 DBT report behind it, and the £1,455 a year is our own multiplication of that report's 86-hour average by the £16.92 hourly labour cost it uses, not a published finding. The Xero reminder facts come from Xero's OpenAPI specification, version 17.0.0. The switching evidence is quoted from PSR CP17/1 of August 2017 and describes the rules before the January 2018 change. GoCardless exit terms come from its bank debit terms, a document carrying no effective date. Adfin publishes this article and sells a consolidated product. Last updated August 2026.
