Open Loyalty went from up to 12 overdue invoices to 1 or 2

Open Loyalty builds a loyalty and gamification platform used by companies around the world. Its finance team spent up to an hour a day chasing as many as 12 overdue invoices and worried that automated reminders would sound cold.

Every message to a customer matters

Open Loyalty sells software to businesses. Sales cycles are long, contracts are large, and every customer has an account manager who knows their people, their approval chain and their pace. Relationships take years to build.

So every message counts, including the one about an overdue invoice. In large organizations payment often takes time because an invoice goes through several approval steps. A clumsy reminder in the middle of that can damage the relationship.

“Before, the reminders were generic. They didn’t feel like us. Now every customer is treated individually, and the clients see it.”
Martyna, senior finance specialist at Open Loyalty

Automation that doesn’t sound like spam

When automation came up, Martyna and Natalia approached it carefully. Natalia wanted to know what software could do better than a person paying attention.

“I handled collections myself at previous companies. When I joined, I really wondered whether automating it made sense.”
Natalia, finance team at Open Loyalty

Martyna had a different worry. Open Loyalty has a rule that every customer matters, whatever is happening with the invoice. She worried that customers would dismiss automated messages as spam and that years of trust would slowly wear away. Those two concerns shaped the plan from the start.

First the tone, then the escalation path

Before, collections were handled externally with standard accounting templates that didn’t sound like Open Loyalty, and following up on overdue invoices still fell to the finance team. So the team started with the tone. Every message now sounds like Open Loyalty and is part of a sequence with several steps rather than a single reminder.

Before the first new reminder went out, the team told customers that payment messages would change. That way nobody mistook the new messages for spam or for someone impersonating Open Loyalty.

The team designed the escalation path itself. Sunbay connects to the accounting system and works from live invoice data, and Open Loyalty decided what each step should look like. A polite reminder goes out first when an invoice is overdue, followed by a more formal one. If the invoice is still unpaid, the account manager takes over the conversation. In the rare cases that need more, the legal team or management steps in.

For the first week Martyna and Natalia checked every message before it went out. After that, they stopped checking each message.

From daily reminders to the occasional check

Reminders used to take 30 to 60 minutes a day. Now Martyna only checks from time to time that the system is running.

The one or two invoices still overdue are no surprise, because they sit in the multi-step approval and payment cycles of large international customers.

No need to choose between cash flow and relationships

In a SaaS company, revenue is recognized over the course of the year, but the business runs on the cash that actually reaches the bank.

An overdue invoice rarely means the customer won’t pay. More often it was lost, got stuck at an approval step or was simply forgotten. Without a reminder it can sit for months and end in an awkward conversation about a service delivered two quarters ago. Regular reminders catch these invoices early, while they are still easy to pay and easy to talk about.

“A relationship is a relationship, but business is business, and in a scaling company even more so. Cash flow is our most important metric. It’s the priority.”
Martyna

Open Loyalty automated collections to protect cash flow and customer relationships at the same time, which the manual process couldn’t do. Next, the team plans to automate the rest of the invoice lifecycle, with finance overseeing the process and stepping in only where judgment is needed.