Playbooks · Everyday tasks · last verified 2026-10-25

Chase an unpaid invoice with an agent

For a freelancer × chasing an unpaid invoice × with ChaseLocal, without letting a draft invent an amount, a deadline, or a late fee.

Before you start

You need the unpaid invoice itself — a PDF, a photo, or its details typed out — and the client's name. The tool in this playbook is ChaseLocal, a free web app by an independent builder that turns one overdue invoice into three follow-up drafts. It drafts; it does not send. You read, correct, and send. Time and cost: NOT_MEASURED. No outcome is promised: a good reminder does not make a client pay, and nothing here is legal or collections advice.

One caution before you start: do not chase from a stale list. If your records are out of date, you will ask a client who already paid for money. Confirm the invoice is actually unpaid before you draft anything — this playbook assumes you have done that, and every check below assumes the invoice in front of you is the unpaid one.

What "done" looks like

At the end of one sitting you have three drafts for one real invoice — polite, firm, and final notice — each checked number by number against the invoice, with the draft that fits how late the payment is picked out, ready for you to send from your own email.

Steps

1. Try the sample invoice first. On the ChaseLocal site, click "Try a sample invoice" before uploading anything of your own. That shows you the whole flow — extracted details, three drafts, the recommended tone — with no real client data involved. If the flow does not make sense on the sample, it will not make sense on your invoice either.
2. Give it your invoice and check what it read. Drop in the invoice as a PDF or photo, or enter the details manually. The app extracts the client name, amount, currency, due date, invoice number, and work description, and calculates how overdue the payment is. Read every extracted field against the invoice before going further. Photos are read on your device, so the image itself never leaves it; PDFs are parsed on the server, and only the extracted text goes to the model. Nothing is stored by the app, according to the author's description — which is also why you should keep your own record of what you send.
3. Read the three drafts and the recommendation. Click "Write follow-ups" once the details look right. You get three drafts that escalate in tone: Polite assumes the delay was an oversight; Firm states the due date and how many days overdue the payment is and asks when payment can be expected; Final notice is the last reminder before escalation, kept professional. The app recommends the draft that fits how late the payment is and tells you when the next tone would apply. Follow the recommendation as a starting point, not as an order — you know the client; the app knows the due date.
4. Check every number before you touch the send button. Compare each draft against the invoice: client name spelled right, amount and currency exact, invoice number exact, due date exact, days overdue counted right. If a draft mentions a late fee, interest, or a deadline your invoice terms do not state, delete that line — the tool's own prompt bans inventing invoice numbers, deadlines, and late fees, but you are the last check, and a wrong number in a payment email is worse than no email at all.
5. Edit for your voice, then send it yourself. Add a payment link if you have one, shorten a draft that rambles, make it more direct if that is how you write to this client. Then copy the draft or open it in your email app and send it from your own account, attaching the original invoice PDF if the client needs it. The app never sends anything on your behalf, so nothing goes out that you have not read.
6. Decide in advance what the end of the ladder means. When the next tone becomes the recommendation and the payment still has not arrived, send that draft — and know what happens after the final notice. Pause work for that client? A phone call? A collections step? The tool stops at the final notice; the decision after it is yours, and it is easier to make now, calmly, than on the day the final notice fails.

Check the agent's work

• Every number in the draft against the invoice: amount, currency, invoice number, due date, days overdue. One wrong number invalidates the whole email.
• No late fee, interest charge, or deadline that your invoice terms do not state. If you did not charge it, the draft must not mention it.
• The tone fits the lateness and the relationship. A final notice to a client who is eight days late and has always paid on time is a relationship mistake, not a firm stance.
• The client name and work description match the invoice. A draft addressed right but describing the wrong job reads as a mail merge error and gets ignored.
• Nothing sent that you have not read. The app drafts; the send is always yours.

What can go wrong

• The extraction misreads your invoice. A blurry photo or an unusual layout can produce a wrong amount or date. That is why step 2 exists: check the fields before generating drafts, and enter the details manually if the extraction keeps getting them wrong.
• A PDF fails to parse. The author's description names password-protected, damaged, and scanned PDFs as cases that produce error messages rather than drafts. A scanned PDF is an image, not text — a clear photo of the invoice is the fallback.
• The app is rate-limited. The app limits use per network address so one visitor cannot exhaust the model quota. If it refuses, wait and retry rather than submitting the same invoice repeatedly.
• You chase a paid invoice. Records go stale. If the client replies that they already paid, check your records before arguing — the mistake may be yours, and a second email makes it worse.

Limits

• Drafts only. The app does not send email, does not track replies, and does not remind you on the next tone's date — reminders are on the author's roadmap, not in the app today.
• No payment-link integration yet: if you want a pay link in the draft, you add it yourself. The author lists real payment links as a future step, not a current feature.
• The app does not store your invoices or your drafts. Keep your own copy of what you sent and when, or you will lose the thread the next time the client goes quiet.
• This is a reminder workflow, not legal advice. Threats, collections language, and statutory interest wording belong to a lawyer or a collections process, not to a draft you edited in a hurry.

Verification

Checked 2026-10-25. This page was not run end to end through the full flow in this pass; its claims rest on the author's own write-up of the tool and a live check that the app answers. Sources: the author's ChaseLocal write-up (three tones, fields extracted, on-device photo reading, constrained prompt banning invented numbers, deadlines, and late fees, roadmap items) and a live fetch of the app returning HTTP 200 this run. Omitted: no day thresholds for tone changes are given, because the write-up gives examples, not thresholds — the page tells readers to follow the app's recommendation instead of a table invented here. No claim is made about accounts, pricing, or data handling beyond what the author's write-up states.

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