How to Cut Your Debtor Days in Half Without Chasing Payments

Every wholesale business knows the feeling: a growing list of overdue invoices, polite reminder emails piling up, and a finance team spending hours every week just trying to get paid.

It’s not only frustrating—it’s bad for business. Long debtor days hurt your cash flow, stall growth, and force you to fund your customers’ operations instead of your own.

But what if there was a way to cut your debtor days in half—without sending a single follow-up email?

Here’s how smart distributors are doing it with PencilPay.

The Real Cost of Long Debtor Days

Before we talk solutions, let’s look at why this matters:

Lost Cash Flow: Money tied up in unpaid invoices limits your ability to invest in inventory, staff, or growth.
Time Drain: Your team spends hours chasing payments that should’ve come in automatically.
Risk Increases: The longer a payment goes unpaid, the less likely it is to ever arrive.
Customer Friction: Repeated follow-ups can harm even your best relationships.

If your average debtor days are 30, 45, or even 60+, it’s time to take action.

Step 1: Make Terms Approval Faster and Smarter

It starts at the beginning. If you’re approving payment terms manually—or based on guesswork—you may be offering credit to the wrong customers.

With PencilPay’s digital credit application, you can:

Collect all customer and director info in one secure form
Run automatic credit checks
Set credit limits and payment terms instantly
Eliminate days or weeks of back-and-forth

Faster onboarding = faster first payment.

Step 2: Automate Your Payment Collection Process

Manually chasing invoices is inefficient. PencilPay solves this by turning your invoice due date into an automated trigger.

Here’s how:

Automated Reminders: Gentle, branded payment nudges are sent automatically before and after due dates.
Auto-Debit: When terms customers connect their payment method (credit card or bank account), you can collect funds automatically when invoices are due.
Custom Payment Plans: For overdue customers, you can build a plan, automate collections, and eliminate awkward calls.

The result? You get paid on time—without chasing.

Step 3: Stop Future Orders for Overdue Accounts

One of the fastest ways to change customer behavior is to tie payment to ordering.

PencilPay allows you to:

Block new orders from customers who are overdue or over their credit limit
Send notifications explaining the pause and how to fix it
Re-activate automatically once the account is back in good standing

No more manual tracking. No more “Can you approve this order?” emails. Just a system that reinforces your terms—consistently.

Real Results: How Businesses Are Cutting Debtor Days

Our customers report cutting debtor days by 30–50% within the first few months of using PencilPay.

Why? Because they shift from a reactive collections process to a proactive, automated payment system that runs in the background while they focus on growth.

Final Thought

Cutting your debtor days doesn’t require more staff or more awkward emails. It just takes a smarter system.

With PencilPay, you can automate customer onboarding, enforce payment terms, and get paid faster—without lifting a finger.

Ready to stop chasing payments and start collecting them automatically?

Book a free demo and discover how PencilPay can transform your cash flow.