Summary
- Amazon defines a team as ‘small enough to share two pizzas’. Often that’s already too big to use the same accounting platform to chase down invoices.
- Your accounting system has no collaboration layer. Xero, QuickBooks, Stripe, NetSuite. They all track what’s owed but not who’s dealing with it.
- This causes specific, predictable issues. Duplicate chasing, payment promises stuck in one person’s inbox, process breaking when someone’s on holiday.
- What a finance team needs to collaborate on chasing down unpaid invoices. Ten requirements, and who in the team actually needs each. Jump to the table
- Four tools worth comparing, plus one your team may already run that partly covers this issue. Jump to the tools
Accounting platforms limit team collaboration
When two or more people both work on chasing unpaid invoices, they need to coordinate. Otherwise customers get a bad experience as a set of familiar problems emerge:
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Two people chase the same client in a week. Nobody did anything wrong. Neither could see that the other had already sent something, and the client now thinks you’re disorganised.
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Payment promises get stuck in one inbox. A client replies “we’ll pay on the 28th” and that valuable information sits in one person’s inbox while they’re out on annual leave.
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Nobody knows what’s already been tried. Before you chase, you need to know whether this customer was chased last week, whether they disputed something in March, and whether someone agreed a payment plan. In most teams that means asking a colleague.
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The finance lead struggles to get visibility. Asking “where are we on receivables?” produces at best a spreadsheet, at worst a meeting.
The root cause is that accounting software wasn’t built for this. The likes of Xero, QuickBooks and Sage are excellent at recording what’s owed and by whom. None of them have a meaningful collaboration layer for chasing down unpaid invoices.
This page assumes you have hit this problem and are looking to improve team coordination on chasing unpaid invoices. For the wider market, the main guide to credit control software covers it more broadly, and if your team is coordinating chasing across several entities, credit control software for enterprises covers that in more detail.
What finance teams need in credit control software
Collaborating as a team creates new requirements, mainly around ownership, visibility and guardrails. Here are ten requirements for debtor management software which finance teams look for when comparing.
| Requirement | Who needs it | Feature to look for |
|---|---|---|
| Know who owns which customer | The team | Assign owners per customer, visible to everyone |
| Shared view of customers by status | The team | See at a glance which customers are |
| Visibility on what’s already been said | The team | Shared activity log across all users, pooling information from separate inboxes |
| Log payment promises | The team | Reply capture that updates the expected payment date against the invoice |
| Avoid duplicate chasing | The team | Per-invoice status showing what was sent, when and by whom |
| Easy to cover during annual leave | The team | History of activity so far attached to the customer record |
| Approvals so a new team member can send safely | Finance lead | Two-layer approvals |
| Visibility on which customers are getting worse | Finance lead | Payment behaviour trend per customer, not just current balance |
| Process consistency across all customers | Finance lead | Shared sequences and templates, set once and applied to everyone |
Four credit control tools for finance teams with pricing
Here are four tools that finance teams can use to coordinate the work of chasing down unpaid invoices. Each one has its own strengths which we will look at below.
| Tool | Best for | Pricing model | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trove | Finance teams using Xero or Quickbooks for their invoicing | Fixed monthly price | £135/month |
| Chaser | Finance teams looking for one platform for sending emails and debt collection | Tiered by revenue (starts at £199) | £199/month |
| Upflow | Finance teams where advanced reporting is crucial | Historically a percentage of collected revenue | On request |
| HubSpot | Finance teams whose invoicing already lives in HubSpot | Per seat | Varies |
Trove
“Trove is basically the communication and reporting tool that Xero doesn’t have.”
– Head of Finance, SaaS company
Trove is designed to sit on top of Xero, Quickbooks or Stripe and help your team collaborate on the same ledger. Activity is logged against the customer or invoice, all inboxes can be shared in one place and specific customers can be assigned to different owners on a joint kanban board. It also offers unlimited users on the Integrated plan.
Best for: Xero, Quickbooks or Stripe users who have outgrown their existing system and need a tool to help them coordinate teamwork.
Where it doesn’t fit: you need invoicing, a payment portal or cash application. Trove does none of these.
Chaser
Chaser is one of the most holistic platforms on the list and can coordinate the entire workflow from invoice to debt collection. It has a similar depth to other platforms, with notes logged against customers and tasks you can assign. The difference is the breadth. If you ever have invoices in debt collection and need to know what’s going on with them, Chaser is the right one.
Best for: finance teams wanting one vendor from reminder through to debt collection.
Upflow
Upflow offers the strongest reporting on the list. A bigger finance team often comes with higher reporting requirements: cohort analysis, payment behaviour, risk scoring. Upflow has all of this alongside the usuals: customers can be assigned to a workflow or an account manager and every interaction sits on a shared timeline. Leans towards larger, faster-growing B2B companies.
Best for: finance teams where advanced reporting is a non-negotiable.
HubSpot
Plenty of finance teams already use Hubspot Invoicing and for these teams it can make the most sense for a credit control tool.
Invoices can be assigned an owner, Professional and Enterprise plans include an accounts receivable dashboard with ageing reports, and reminders can be sent out automatically. In September 2026 HubSpot added Revenue Agent, an AI collections tool, currently in private beta, that monitors open invoices, runs outreach, and follows up if a promised payment date passes.
Best for: finance teams who use Hubspot for invoicing.
Frequently asked questions
We already have a credit controller. Do we still need this? A credit controller with the right tool chases more accounts, more consistently, and spends less time reconstructing what happened. The tool isn’t a substitute for the person. It’s the difference between them working from a system and working from their inbox.
What does a finance director actually get out of it? A receivables position available on demand rather than assembled on request, payment promises visible in the forecast rather than in someone’s email, and consistency in how customers are treated regardless of who chased them.
How is this different from doing it in Xero? Xero records what’s owed. It has no ownership, no shared history, no reply capture and no reporting beyond an ageing list. That’s enough for one person and a handful of clients, and it stops being enough as soon as coordination matters.
One person does the chasing today, but we’re hiring. Should we wait? No. Retrofitting a process onto a team is harder than starting with one, and the history you build now is what the next person inherits.
Can different people chase different customers? In a tool built for teams, yes, assignment per customer with everyone able to see the full history. This is one of the clearest dividing lines between tools built for an individual and tools built for a team.
What if there’s nobody on the team doing this at all? That’s a different problem with a different answer. Credit control when nobody owns it covers that case.
Trove chases your overdue invoices from your team’s own email addresses, reads the replies, and keeps the history against the customer rather than the person, so anyone can pick up any account. Unlimited users on every plan, from £50 a month. Book a demo to see it against your own ledger.
