Invoices out the day the work is done, and every open one followed up until it is paid or escalated.
The work is finished and the invoice is out, and chasing it loses to every emergency until cash gets tight enough to notice. Inside one restoration company Surge mapped $1.3M sitting in receivables, 293 invoices averaging 199 days old, with no follow-up running.
Collections is the task that feels rude and gets skipped. A schedule does not feel rude.
- Invoices are drafted the day the job closes and reviewed before they go out.
- Every open invoice is aged, visible, and reminded on a schedule, with the oldest dollars pushed to a person.
- Failed or late payments become a task the same day, not a discovery at month end.
Six steps, and a person on the controls at step five.
Every Surge workflow runs the same shape: something triggers it, it qualifies or processes, it updates your system, it talks to the customer in your voice, it hands anything uncertain to a person, and it measures what changed.
- Draft invoice created in accounting from completed job data
- Reminder ladder at set intervals with disputes routed to a person
- Payment status and failed-payment routing from the processor
- Insurance-funded work handled on its own cadence
- 01Trigger
Work completes or an invoice ages
Job marked done, or an open invoice crosses a threshold.
- 02Qualify or process
Apply the rules
Draft the invoice from line items, or check age, status, and any dispute flag.
- 03System update
Update the books
Draft written to accounting; status and reminders logged on the customer.
- 04Customer communication
Remind, politely
Approved reminders by email or text, referencing the actual invoice.
- 05Human escalation
A person decides
Disputes, partial payments, and the oldest items go to a person. Nothing charges a card.
- 06Measurement
Measure
Days to invoice, aging buckets, reminder outcomes, and dollars collected by week.
- Every invoice is sent by a person after review
- Nothing charges, refunds, or retries a payment on its own
- Disputes and exceptions always route to a person
- Direct QuickBooks API access requires Intuit's app assessment, even for a single client; connectors avoid it for simpler builds
- Two-way sync between field software and accounting is quoted only after validation, because it is where automation quietly corrupts books
- Collections messages must stay truthful and non-harassing, and insurance-funded work often needs a different cadence
$2,000 to $5,000
One to three weeks depending on scope
A reminder sequence is a single automation. Invoice creation plus reminders plus payment status plus exception routing is a multi-tool build.
Full pricing →- QuickBooks Online
- Stripe
- Square
- FreshBooks
- Jobber
- JobNimbus
- GoHighLevel
- Gmail
Does it take payments automatically?
No. It drafts, reminds, and reports. People decide, and nothing touches a customer's money without a person. That is a rule, not a limitation of the tools.
What did you do at the restoration company?
Read the whole job history through the CRM's API and mapped every stuck invoice by age and stage. The follow-up design was built; the engagement paused before it went live, so no recovery number is claimed. The case study says exactly that.
Not sure which of these applies to you?
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Thirty minutes on a call. A one-page roadmap with your three highest-value opportunities, reviewed by Austin before it is sent. Yours whether or not you hire Surge.