17/09/2026
Why Are We Still Chasing Invoices?
There is something strange about the way businesses collect money.
A business/institution can issue an invoice in seconds, record the transaction in an accounting system, send a receipt automatically and accept payment through M-Pesa almost instantly.
But when the invoice becomes overdue, the process often goes backwards.
Someone has to notice it.
Someone has to find the customer.
Someone has to write the message.
Someone has to remember to follow up again.
And eventually, someone has to check whether the payment came in and update the records.
It is a surprisingly manual process for something that is, in many cases, completely predictable.
The system already knows that an invoice is due on the 15th.
It knows when the 15th passes.
It knows how much is outstanding.
It may even know how the customer/client normally communicates with the business/institution.
Yet the actual follow-up still ends up depending on a person remembering to do it.
I find that interesting.
Not because businesses/institutions need another way to send reminders. They already have plenty of those.
The more interesting question is why the information a business already has isn't being used to drive the next action automatically.
There are probably many good reasons why this is still difficult; different accounting systems, payment providers, communication channels, customer preferences and, importantly, the need to avoid turning a payment reminder into spam.
But the underlying problem seems worth solving.
Because an overdue invoice isn't really an unexpected event.
It is an event the business has been expecting since the invoice was created.
