Google Sheets is a common first choice for tracking receivables. One tab of invoices, a column with due dates, conditional formatting that turns overdue rows red and access for a few people. It works well at first, because the sheet costs nothing, everyone sees the same thing and you can change the layout in minutes.
The sheet is only as current as the last import
The data about invoices and payments lives in the accounting system and the bank, not in the sheet. Someone has to export it, paste it in and check who has paid. If that happens once a week, for the rest of the week the sheet shows where things stood on the day of the update, and a reminder can go to a customer who paid yesterday.
Shared access, which was an advantage at the start, becomes a problem over time. Several people edit the same rows, someone overwrites a status by accident, someone else sorts a single column. Version history lets you undo it, but only once someone notices that something is wrong.
Reminders from a sheet need scripts and supervision
The sheet won’t send a reminder on its own. Companies get around this with mail merge add-ons or their own Apps Script code that sends emails from Gmail. That works until someone renames a column, adds a new tab or the person who wrote the script leaves the company. The messages also go out from someone’s own mailbox, so customer replies land with that one person and nobody else sees them.
The sheet doesn’t record conversations either. What was agreed with a customer, a promise to pay or a dispute ends up in comments, in emails or in someone’s memory.
Signs you have outgrown the sheet
- You issue several hundred invoices a month, and the overdue list has dozens of entries.
- Someone on your team spends several hours a week updating the sheet and writing reminders.
- Reminders sometimes reach customers who have already paid.
- When management asks about overdue invoices, the answer takes an hour with the sheet rather than a minute.
What to use instead
The next step doesn’t have to be a large ERP. A system that pulls invoices from your accounting software, matches payments booked there to invoices and sends reminders according to the rules you set is enough.
That is how Sunbay works. It connects to your accounting software and CRM, then sends email and text reminders and issues interest notes and demand letters in the order and at the intervals you choose. It records the full history of contact with the customer next to every invoice. If you don’t have an integration yet, you can start with a CSV file. The collections automation page shows how it works step by step.
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