Tracking B2B Invoices and Payment Terms

AskBiz imports invoice and payment data from Xero and QuickBooks — including invoice date, due date, payment date (when paid), and outstanding balance. Once connected, all your outstanding and historical invoices are visible in Finance → Debtors.

For businesses not using Xero or QuickBooks, you can upload invoice data via CSV (Settings → Integrations → Upload CSV → Invoice Data). Use the AskBiz invoice template to ensure the columns match correctly.

The Debtors dashboard shows:

• Total outstanding: the total value of all unpaid invoices
• Current (not yet due): invoices within agreed payment terms
• 1–30 days overdue: invoices past due date by up to 30 days
• 31–60 days overdue: increasingly at-risk invoices
• 60+ days overdue: high-risk; collection action may be needed
• Debtor days (DSO): average number of days customers take to pay, across all B2B accounts

The waterfall chart in the Debtors view shows how much outstanding debt sits in each aging bucket. A healthy B2B business has the majority of outstanding debt in 'Current' and '1–30 days overdue'. Growing balances in the 31–60 and 60+ buckets signal a collection problem.

AskBiz tracks each trade account's payment behaviour individually:

• Average days to pay: how many days after invoice date they typically pay
• Payment consistency: are they reliably on time, or erratic?
• Trend: are they paying faster or slower than they used to?

Go to Customers → Trade Accounts → [account] → Payment History to see a full ledger for each account. Accounts whose average days to pay is increasing are early warning signs — escalating slowly rather than suddenly is typical before a payment problem becomes serious.

Setting a credit limit in AskBiz (per account) will trigger an alert when outstanding invoices for that account exceed the limit.

AskBiz generates an Overdue Invoice Chase List — a prioritised list of invoices to chase, sorted by days overdue and outstanding value.

For each overdue invoice, the chase list shows:

• Invoice number, value, and original due date
• Days overdue
• Customer contact details (pulled from your CRM integration if connected)
• History of previous chase actions (if you log them in AskBiz)

Log each chase action (call made, email sent, response received) directly in AskBiz so there is a full paper trail — useful if the debt escalates to formal collection.

For automation, connect AskBiz to Chaser or Satago (via Zapier) to trigger automated overdue invoice reminder emails at set intervals.

Every day an invoice is overdue costs you money. AskBiz calculates the cost of late payment for your business:

• Financing cost: if you are using an overdraft or invoice finance facility, late payment increases the interest cost
• Opportunity cost: cash tied up in debtors cannot be used to purchase stock, pay staff, or fund growth
• DSO impact: rising debtor days reduces working capital efficiency

Go to Finance → Debtors → Impact Calculator to see the estimated annual cost of your current overdue position — expressed in £ of financing cost and working capital tied up. This number often surprises business owners and provides motivation to tighten credit control processes.