Chase invoices on a schedule, not a hunch.

Ask a founder why a customer has not paid and the answer is usually about the customer. Look at ten invoices and the pattern is normally different: the invoice went out eleven days after the work was delivered, it was missing a purchase order reference, nobody followed up until day forty, and the follow-up went to a person who does not process payments.

None of that needs a difficult conversation to fix. It needs a list of open invoices that updates itself, and a schedule that says who does what on which day. The awkward calls, when they are still needed, then land on a much smaller number of invoices.

That is all this template is. It will not make a customer with no money pay, and it will not replace a commercial conversation about terms. It does remove the ten to fifteen days most Indian B2B firms lose to their own process, and those days are cash rather than admin: on ₹48 lakh of monthly billing, fifteen days is about ₹24 lakh sitting in someone else's account.

When an Indian business customer pays for professional or technical services, they usually deduct tax at source before paying. The invoice says ten lakh, the bank receives about nine, and the difference is not a shortfall: it is a tax credit sitting with the government against your own liability.

Trackers that ignore this show every paid invoice as partly unpaid, and within a couple of months nobody trusts the balance column. So TDS is entered separately, the balance is calculated after it, and an invoice settles cleanly when the customer has paid.

It also gives you a second useful number: total TDS deducted for the period, which should match what customers report against your tax account. Reconciling that every quarter is how companies avoid finding missing credits at year end.

The single change that moves collection days most is not a discount or a new payment gateway. It is following the same sequence for every customer, every time, so nobody has to decide whether today is the day to chase.

Two things make it work. It starts before the due date, which is administrative rather than confrontational. And it escalates by person rather than by tone, so nobody has to write an angry email to make the next step feel different.

Four numbers on the summary sheet are worth looking at weekly.

• ·Total outstanding, as a share of a month's revenue. Two months of revenue sitting in receivables is common and usually too much.
• ·The past due share. Everything beyond terms is money you have a right to chase today.
• ·Collection days, estimated from outstanding against monthly revenue. Watch the direction rather than the level.
• ·Concentration. One customer holding half the balance is a different risk from twenty holding a little each, and the response is different too.

The buckets carry their own instruction: nothing to do within terms, a call in the first thirty days over, commercial escalation after that, and a decision about further credit beyond sixty. Following the bucket rather than the relationship is what keeps collections from depending on how the founder feels that week.

It is worth putting two of these numbers into the monthly pack as well: outstanding as a share of revenue, and the past due amount. Both move slowly enough that a change means something, and both are questions an investor will ask eventually.

An illustrative Monday for a services firm with about ₹48 lakh of monthly billing. Every figure is invented.

Total outstanding is about ₹37.5 lakh, of which ₹20.9 lakh is past due, and estimated collection days are around 23. Two of the five rows need real attention, one needs a phone call, and two need nothing at all.

That is the whole value of the sheet. Without it, a founder either chases everyone or nobody, usually depending on how the bank balance looks that morning. With it, ten minutes produces a list of two names and one clear decision.

A tracker measures the problem. Most of the days are won before an invoice is ever chased.

1. 01Invoice the day work is delivered or the milestone is met, not at month end.
2. 02Ask each new customer what their invoice needs: purchase order reference, entity name, GSTIN, portal format. Get it right on the first invoice.
3. 03Confirm who processes payments and on what days. Many large companies run payment cycles, and aiming at the cycle is worth a week.
4. 04Put payment terms in the contract, along with what happens when they are missed.
5. 05For new or unknown customers, ask for part payment up front or milestone billing. Far easier to agree at the start.
6. 06Give one person the ageing report and the ladder, and review it weekly for ten minutes.

Companies that do the first two alone usually take a week out of their cycle, because a correct invoice sent on the day is the only part of the process entirely within your control. Everything after it depends on somebody else.

Collections works best when one person owns the sheet and the ladder, and that person is usually whoever runs finance day to day rather than the founder or the salesperson.

Sales still matters, at one specific step. An account manager asking their contact to nudge a payment through often works where finance cannot, because it is a favour between people who know each other rather than a demand from a stranger. Keeping that step in the ladder, at day ten, is what makes the rest of the sequence unnecessary in most cases.

The founder's role is the last two steps and nothing before them. A founder who chases at day five has nowhere left to escalate to at day forty, and the customer learns that every message carries the same weight.