What does this reply mean?
Paste what your customer wrote back about an unpaid invoice. You will get what it actually signals, the phrase in their own words that decided it, what to do next — including when doing nothing is the right answer — and two replies you can send.
No account, no mailbox connection, nothing to install.
The rules this answer went through
These are enforced in code, not in a prompt. The model proposes; ordinary deterministic code decides — and every rule that overrode the model is recorded against the invoice, so you can read why Collectly did something other than what it was told.
- Risk can only be raised, never lowered. The model may argue an invoice is riskier than the numbers say; it cannot argue one is safer.
- A customer marked do-not-contact is never written to, whatever the invoice says. That check runs before anything else.
- A paid or written-off invoice is never chased again. Follow-ups are switched off permanently, not deferred.
- A disputed invoice stops automated chasing entirely and goes to a person to resolve.
- If the last reply was hostile, nothing escalates automatically. A human decides what happens next.
- Someone asking for a corrected invoice gets a correction queued, not a payment reminder.
- Someone who says the invoice never arrived gets it resent, in a friendly tone, instead of being chased for it.
- Someone who says they have already paid gets verified against your records, not chased again.
- A promise to pay on a date pauses reminders until that date has passed. Collectly checks back the day after, not on the day.
- An invoice you have snoozed stays snoozed until the date you set.
- An invoice that is not due yet is not chased. It waits for the due date however overdue the rest of the account is.
- At least three days between reminders on the same invoice, so re-running the analysis cannot turn into nagging. A resent or corrected invoice the customer has just asked for is not a reminder, and still waits for your approval.
- Tone is capped by how late the invoice actually is. Nothing firm goes out at day five, however the model phrases it.
- Past thirty days overdue, a person approves anything beyond a routine reminder.
- If the model is less than 60% confident about what is going on, it hands the invoice to you instead of guessing.
And one more, before any of that matters: Nothing sends itself unless you turned that on. Even then it is limited to low-risk invoices between one and thirteen days overdue.
This page runs the same applyGuardrails function the paid product runs, on the same classification. The difference is how much it has to work with: with one pasted reply and no invoice, several of the rules above have nothing to check, and the result tells you which ones rather than counting them as passed.
Questions people ask about invoice replies
- What does it mean when a customer says they will pay next week?
- It is a commitment, and it should change what you do rather than just what you feel. Treat it as a promise only if it names a date or a timeframe you can resolve to one — "next week", "on Friday" and "in our run on the 30th" all resolve; "soon" and "we will look into it" do not. If it does resolve, write the date down and send nothing until it has passed. Chasing someone before the date they gave you is the fastest way to turn a cooperative customer into a slow one.
- What should I do when a customer says they have already paid?
- Check your bank or payment processor before you reply, not after. A reminder sent to somebody who has genuinely paid costs you more goodwill than a day's delay costs you cash. If you cannot find it, ask for the date, amount and reference it was sent with rather than asking them to pay again — the usual answers are that it went to an old account, it is still sitting in their approval queue, or it was paid against a different invoice.
- How do I reply to a customer who is disputing an invoice?
- Stop chasing payment entirely and answer it as a person. A dispute is not a collections problem, and another reminder while one is open makes it worse and harder to settle. Acknowledge that they disagree, ask exactly which line or amount is wrong, and get the objection in writing before you defend anything. Collectly enforces this in code: an invoice marked disputed, or a reply classified as a dispute, blocks automated follow-up outright and hands the invoice to a human.
- What does it mean when a customer stops replying?
- Silence is not refusal, and it is usually not personal. In business-to-business invoicing the common causes are an invoice sitting with someone who has no authority to approve it, a missing purchase-order number, or a contact who has left. The useful next email asks for one specific thing — a date, or the name of the person who signs it off — rather than repeating the amount they already know.
- Is it safe to paste a customer's email into this tool?
- The text is sent to the language model that produces the answer and is not stored anywhere afterwards. It is not written to our database, it is not written to our logs, and it is not included in any error report. What we keep is a one-way SHA-256 hash of the text, the category it was classified as, and the time — enough to count how often the tool gets used, and not enough to reconstruct a word of the message. There is a test in the repository that pushes a marker string through the whole endpoint and fails if it appears in any database column or any log line.
- Do I need an account to use this?
- No. There is no signup, no email wall and no trial to start. The tool runs in the page you are on. It is limited to a handful of submissions per connection per hour, because each one costs a real model call and the page is open to everyone.
- How is this different from pasting the email into ChatGPT?
- The classification comes from a language model in both cases. What is different is what happens to the answer afterwards: here it passes through the same deterministic rules the paid product runs, so the recommendation cannot be talked into chasing a paid invoice or escalating on a customer who is upset, however the reply is worded. The rules are ordinary code, listed further down this page, and this tool tells you which of them it could not check because you only gave it one message.
Collectly does this across every invoice, on its own
You just decoded one reply. Collectly does the same thing continuously for every unpaid invoice you have — reads the replies, works out why each one is unpaid, estimates when it will land, and drafts the follow-up for you to approve.
With 15 rules it cannot talk its way around
- A paid or written-off invoice is never chased again. Follow-ups are switched off permanently, not deferred.
- A disputed invoice stops automated chasing entirely and goes to a person to resolve.
- A promise to pay on a date pauses reminders until that date has passed. Collectly checks back the day after, not on the day.
- At least three days between reminders on the same invoice, so re-running the analysis cannot turn into nagging. A resent or corrected invoice the customer has just asked for is not a reminder, and still waits for your approval.
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