The money in your 90 day column is already yours: what a Claude Code skill for invoice chasing can and cannot get back
Everything sitting past due is work you have already done and already paid for. You funded the wages, the stock and the van, and somebody else is holding the receipt. The chase is the cheapest money in your business, and it is the first job that gets dropped when the week gets busy.
- The cash: overdue balance × your annual cost of money ÷ 12 = what carrying it costs you every month.
- The job: read the ledger, bucket by days past due, draft one message per invoice, sort by value.
- What a skill takes: the drafting and the remembering, every time, without being reminded.
- What it must never take: the send button. A wrong chase costs the customer, not the invoice.
- Break-even: $250 fixed ÷ your average invoice = the fraction of one invoice the chase must recover.
What is a Claude Code skill for invoice chasing?
It is a plain text instruction file that reads your overdue list, works out which invoices have crossed 30, 60 or 90 days past their due date, and drafts the right message for each one. It drafts and sorts. A person still presses send.
That is the whole shape of it. If you have never seen one, this is what a Claude Code skill actually is: a file, not an app.
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📆 every row compared against today's date
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🗃️ sorted into 30, 60 and 90 day buckets
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✍️ one draft written per invoice, tone set by the bucket
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💰 the queue ordered by value, biggest first
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👤 you read them, and you send them
Core insight: chasing is not hard work, it is dated work. The difficulty was never the email. It is that nothing in your week is watching the calendar on your behalf.
What your 30, 60 and 90 day columns cost you every month
Overdue money is not idle money. It is a loan you are making to your customers, at your own borrowing rate, without a contract.
÷ 12
= what the wait costs you, every month
Put your own figures in below. Nothing is sent anywhere; the arithmetic runs in your browser and the numbers stay on your screen.
Think of it like the date labels in a supermarket chiller. Nobody on the shop floor remembers when each pot of yoghurt turns; the date printed on the lid does the remembering, and one person walks the aisle every morning. Your ledger already has the dates on it. What is missing is the walk.
Why the chase slips, every single week
Chasing is three jobs wearing one name, and only one of them is unpleasant. That one is why the other two run late.
| Part of the chase | What it actually is | Does a skill take it? |
|---|---|---|
| Remembering | Noticing that today is day 31 on this invoice, and day 61 on that one | Yes, completely. A date comparison never gets busy. |
| Drafting | Writing a polite, firm, correct note with the right reference and amount on it | Yes, nearly all of it, once you have written your three tones down once. |
| Judging | Deciding whether this customer gets a nudge, a phone call, or nothing this week | No. This one is yours, and it is why the other two get delayed. |
The dread lives in the third row. Taking the first two off a person stops the dread dragging them down with it.
What the skill does on day 31, 61 and 91
Here is the whole run, in the order a person would describe it to a new starter.
- Read the overdue list. A spreadsheet export is enough: one row per invoice, with a due date and an amount.
- Subtract each due date from today, and drop anything that is not past due yet.
- Put every remaining row into a 30, 60 or 90 day bucket.
- Pick the tone from the bucket: a reminder at 30, a firmer note at 60, a final notice quoting your terms at 90.
- Draft one message per invoice, with the real reference, the real amount and the real due date filled in.
- Sort the drafts biggest first, so the ten minutes you actually have goes to the money that matters.
- Stop, and hand the queue over. Nothing leaves the building without a person reading it.
The step that earns its keep is step two. Everything else you could manage on a good week. Step two happens on the bad weeks too, and that is the only reason the number moves.
Where a chasing skill has to stop
A late invoice costs you interest. A wrong chase can cost you the customer. Those are not the same size of mistake.
Give it this
- Reading your own ledger export
- Bucketing by days past due
- Drafting from the tones you wrote down
- Sorting the queue by value
- Flagging anything it is unsure about
Never give it this
- The send button, on any channel
- A customer with an open dispute
- Anything that reads as a legal threat
- Deciding to stop supplying someone
- Your payment portal or bank login
Keep it on drafts and the worst failure is a message you delete before sending. Give it the send button and the worst failure lands in a customer's inbox with your name on it.
What you need to run one
Less than people expect. There is no server, no subscription to a chasing product, and no integration project.
A list with dates
A CSV or spreadsheet export with a due date and an amount on every row. An accounting connection is a nice-to-have, not a requirement.
Three tones, written once
How you want to sound at 30, at 60 and at 90 days. Write them the way you would actually say them out loud.
Claude Code on one machine
The same setup every skill runs on, covered in what you need to run a custom skill.
If you would rather write it yourself, skills are plain text and the route is documented: the step-by-step guide to writing one.
What the chase has to recover to pay for the build
A custom skill from this site is a fixed $250, and the written scope before it costs nothing. That makes the break-even sum a single division.
= how much of one invoice the chase must pull back
The calculator above prints that figure from your own average. On most trade and services ledgers it lands inside a single invoice.
The honest ceiling: a chasing skill cannot make a customer solvent, and it cannot win an argument about whether the work was done. It only removes the excuse that nobody got round to it. If your overdue money is disputed rather than forgotten, this is the wrong tool and you should not buy one.
If you are weighing hours rather than cash, the arithmetic on hours saved runs the same shape of sum with a stopwatch instead of a ledger.
Send me the shape of your ageing report, and I will scope the chase free
Describe the columns your overdue list has. A written scope comes back within 24 hours, including a straight answer on whether this is worth building for your ledger.
- Brief and written scope: free
- $250 fixed, paid only after you agree the scope
- Tested skill within 5 business days of payment
- Fixed free until it does what the scope says
Get my free chase scope → Send the column headings, never a real customer list.
Quick answers
What is a Claude Code skill for invoice chasing?
A text file of instructions that reads your overdue list, buckets it by days past due, and drafts one message per invoice. It never sends.
What is the overdue money costing me?
Overdue balance times your annual cost of money, divided by twelve, is the monthly carry. Use the rate you actually borrow at.
Should it email customers on its own?
No. A wrong chase can cost you the customer rather than the invoice. Keep a person on the send button.
How much does it have to recover to pay for itself?
$250 divided by your average invoice. That is the fraction of one invoice the chase has to pull back.
Does it work from a spreadsheet?
Yes, as long as each row carries a due date and an amount. No accounting integration is needed for it to be useful.
Sources for the figures above: the $250 fixed price, the free written scope within 24 hours, the tested skill within 5 business days of payment and the fixed-free-until-it-matches-the-scope guarantee are the terms published on the custom build page and in the Terms. That a Claude Code skill is a plain text instruction file is set out in what Claude Code skills are. Every monetary figure on this page other than the $250 is one you typed into the calculator yourself; its starting values are round placeholders, chosen to be obviously not a measurement of anyone's business.
Need a Claude Code skill built? Free scope in 24 hours, $250 fixed →
Related: build it or buy it and what a custom skill costs against contractor rates and is Claude Code worth it, priced against this exact chore.