Three of us, two cities.

A letter from the founder

I watched a business I know well nearly go under while it was profitable. It had a full order book and customers who liked it. What it did not have was the money it had already earned, because that was sitting in eleven other companies' bank accounts and nobody at our end had the time to ask for it twice.

The bookkeeper had four other jobs. The reminders went out when she got to them, which was usually late, and they were always a little apologetic, because asking for money you are owed somehow feels rude. By the time anyone noticed that a customer had queried an invoice back in March, it was June.

None of that is a hard problem. It is just a constant one. A good credit controller does the same short list of things every day and does not get bored or embarrassed: reads the ledger, works out who to push, writes something civil and specific, spots that a reply is actually a complaint, and matches the money when it turns up. Companies under about twenty people cannot justify that salary. Companies over it usually have one person doing it for four hundred customers.

So that is what Chasing Co. is. It connects to the ledger you already keep, reads every open invoice, and does the follow-up across email, SMS and WhatsApp in your name and your wording. It reads what comes back. It can tell "paying Friday" from "we only got half the units", and it treats those completely differently. The awkward ones go to a human with the whole thread attached. When money lands, it finds the invoice and closes it off.

Australia and Singapore first, because they are the two places I actually live and the two sets of rules I actually understand. Both are full of good businesses being quietly underpaid, and both have enough politeness in the culture to make asking harder than it needs to be. Chasing Co. is polite too. It is just never tired.

Things it will not do: buy your receivables, lend against them, send anything in your name that you have not read a version of, or train a model on your customers. And it will never chase a private individual for a personal debt. That is a licensed industry with obligations we do not carry, and it is not what this is.

The name is literal. It chases invoices until they are paid. We looked for a reason to call it something cleverer and could not find one.

If you issue somewhere between a hundred and a few thousand invoices a month, and the chasing is worse than you would like to admit, send me a ledger and I will show you what Chasing Co. would have done with last week. That tends to end the conversation faster than anything I can write here.