Open Loyalty, a platform for building loyalty programs with gamification elements used by companies around the world, was spending up to an hour a day chasing as many as 12 overdue invoices — and worried that automating it would make their reminders feel cold. With Sunbay, they automated collections in their own voice within a week. Overdue invoices dropped to 1–2, daily chasing went to zero, and not one customer relationship took a hit.
How Open Loyalty stopped chasing payments
From 12 overdue invoices to 1–2. From up to an hour a day to zero. From cold reminders to a cadence customers actually answer.
"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, Open Loyalty
Before SunbayAfter SunbayOverdue invoices at any timeUp to 121–2, all within predictable enterprise billing cyclesDaily time on chasing30–60 minZeroCustomer commsGeneric external templatesPersonalized, escalating, in Open Loyalty's voice
The company
Open Loyalty is a platform for building loyalty programs with gamification elements, used by companies around the world. SaaS. B2B.
That shapes everything else. Sales cycles are long. Contracts are high-value. Every account has a manager who knows the customer's people, their approval chains, their pace. Relationships are built over years and kept on trust.
So every message to a customer matters, including the one about an overdue invoice. In large organizations, payment often takes time simply because billing runs through complex, multi-step cycles. A clumsy reminder in the middle of that doesn't just look bad. It strains a relationship that took years to build.
What they wouldn't compromise on
When automation came up, Martyna and Natalia took the question seriously. Natalia had run collections by hand at other companies. She wanted to know what software could really do better than a person paying attention.
"I handled collections myself at previous companies. When I joined, I genuinely wondered whether automating it made sense." — Natalia
Martyna's concern went even deeper. Open Loyalty has a principle: every customer matters, whatever is happening with the invoice. The worry wasn't automation itself. It was cold automation, the kind clients dismiss as spam, the kind that quietly undoes years of trust.
Those two concerns set the bar for the rollout.
How they rolled it out
Previously, collections were handled externally, through standard accounting templates that lacked Open Loyalty's personal touch. So the first thing the team fixed was the voice. Every message now reads as Open Loyalty — personal, and part of a clear, escalating sequence rather than a single standalone reminder.
They also protected the relationship before a single new reminder went out. Every customer was told, ahead of the switch, that the reminder messages would change, so nothing would look like spam or a message that wasn't really from Open Loyalty. Telling customers first is a finance team thinking about the brand, not just the workflow.
Then they designed the escalation themselves. Sunbay connects to the accounting system and works from live invoice data; Open Loyalty decided how the sequence should feel. It moves through a few measured stages — a friendly first reminder once an invoice is overdue, and a more formal follow-up if it stays open. If the invoice is still unpaid, the account's salesperson picks up the conversation personally, because every client has an account owner who knows them well. And in the rare case something needs to go further, the internal legal or management team steps in to resolve it directly.
For the first week, Martyna and Natalia checked every message before trusting it. After a week, the checks weren't needed. It just worked.
What changed
Chasing invoices used to take 30–60 minutes a day. Now it takes none. Martyna checks the system occasionally to confirm it's running. That's it.
Overdue invoices dropped from up to 12 to 1–2 monthly. The few that remain aren't surprises — they sit within the complex, multi-step billing cycles that are normal for large international clients. Known, expected, fully under control.
"Looking at how much time it saved, and the work that time goes to instead — it's night and day. It's genuinely worth delegating." — Natalia
Cash flow without the friction
For a scaling SaaS, cash flow is the number that matters most. Revenue is booked across the whole year, but the business actually runs on what reaches the bank.
Here's what's easy to miss about a late invoice: the client usually isn't refusing to pay. The invoice just got lost, stuck at one step of an approval chain, or forgotten in a busy week. Without a reminder, it can sit there for months. By then it's an awkward conversation about a service from two quarters ago, and finance is asking whether to write it off.
A steady, automatic cadence catches those invoices early — while they're still easy to pay and easy to talk about. That protects the cash flow. It also protects the relationship, because nobody has to send an angry email.
So Martyna and Natalia never had to choose between the two. They handed the routine reminders to software, and kept the work that actually needs a person.
"Relationship is relationship, but business is business — and in a scaling business, even more so. Cash flow is our most important metric. It's the priority." — Martyna
The bottom line
Open Loyalty didn't automate collections to cut costs or shrink a team. They did it to protect two things at once — the cash flow a scaling company runs on, and the customer relationships it's built on. The old manual process kept forcing a choice between them. The new one doesn't.
The direction now is full automation across the whole invoice lifecycle. Finance keeps watch over the process instead of running it by hand. The judgment work stays with people; everything routine runs quietly in the background.
Chasing payments used to be a task someone dreaded. Now the invoices handle themselves.
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