Best tools for automating accounts receivable (2026)

The best accounts receivable automation tool for a B2B service business depends on one question: do you want software that sends reminders you configure, or an agent that runs collections for you? Reeve is the strongest option if you want the second and you run on QuickBooks Online. Chaser is the most established choice if you have a dedicated credit control team and need multi-ERP support. InvoiceSherpa is the budget pick for very small books. And QuickBooks' own reminders are free, and worth understanding before you pay for anything.

This review covers the four options a US service business on QuickBooks realistically ends up comparing. We build Reeve, so read the Reeve section knowing that. We have tried to be straight about where each tool is the right answer, including when it is not us.

What does AR automation software actually do?

At minimum, it watches your open invoices and sends reminders on a schedule so you do not have to. The better tools go further: they escalate tone over time, move to a second channel when email goes unanswered, stop the moment a payment lands, and route replies (disputes, promises to pay, questions) back to a human. The best ones also tell you something your accounting software will not, like your real days sales outstanding or which clients are quietly drifting from net 30 to net 60.

The gap between those tiers is mostly about how much work you have to do before the tool does anything. Some products want templates, workflows, and schedules built before the first email goes out. Others read your books and start.

How we compared them

• Setup time. How long from signup to the first follow-up actually sent.
• Who it sends as. Your own name and email, or the vendor's domain.
• Channels. Email only, or email plus SMS and calls.
• What happens on payment. Whether follow-up stops immediately, and how the tool knows.
• Price, honestly. Published pricing as of September 2026, with what the entry tier actually includes.
• Who it is really for. Every tool here is the right choice for somebody. We say who.

1. Reeve: best for B2B service businesses on QuickBooks that want collections handled

Reeve is an AR agent rather than a reminder scheduler. You connect QuickBooks Online, it reads your open invoices and payment history, and it starts following up in your name, from your own Gmail or Outlook. Follow-ups escalate in stages (friendly, then direct, then firm, then an owner-review step before anything goes further), and when a client pays, everything stops. No templates to write, no workflows to build.

Where it is different from the other tools here: every message is written fresh for that invoice and that client's history, not pulled from a template with merge fields. Replies come back to your inbox and Reeve reads them, so a dispute pauses the sequence and a promise to pay sets a date. And alongside collections it gives you the AR numbers QuickBooks does not: DSO, aging by client, days late, collection speed, reconciled to the dollar.

Where it is not the right fit: if you are not on QuickBooks Online, or you need a customer-facing payment portal today, or you have a multi-entity credit control team with its own established process. Reeve is built for the owner or finance lead who wants the follow-up to just happen.

2. Chaser: best for teams with a dedicated credit control function

Chaser is the most established product in this category, with a decade of history, strong review-site presence, and the broadest integration list: QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, NetSuite, and more. It does email and SMS reminders, automated phone calls, a payment portal, receivables forecasting on the top tier, and an add-on service (Chaser Care) where their specialists work your ledger alongside your team.

The trade-off is that it is built for a team that will configure it. Plans are organized around numbers of users, templates, and workflows, and getting value out of it means building those. That is fine, and arguably preferable, if you have a credit controller whose job this is. It is a lot if you are the owner and this is the thing you were hoping to stop thinking about.

On price: Chaser's entry plan (Compact) is £199 per month, roughly $259, and is scoped to businesses under £4M in annual revenue. The next tier (Core) is £599 per month. Chaser lists pricing in USD on its site, but the company and much of its customer base are UK-based, which shows in the case studies and the support hours.

3. InvoiceSherpa: best for very small books on a tight budget

InvoiceSherpa has been around for over a decade and does the basics competently: scheduled email and SMS reminders, a branded customer portal with online payment, autopay, late fees, and integrations with QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Clio. Pricing is by open invoice count, starting at $49 per month for up to 100 open invoices, which makes it the cheapest paid option here by a wide margin.

What you are buying is a scheduler with a payment portal. You write the reminder scripts, set the cadence, and it sends. It does not read replies, adapt tone, or escalate based on what a client does. Two things to know before signing up: there is a 1% transaction fee on invoices paid through the platform (waived if you use their payment partner), and the tiers cap open invoices, so a business with a few hundred invoices outstanding lands on the $99 or $199 plan, not the $49 one.

4. QuickBooks Online's built-in reminders: best if you have not tried them yet

Before paying for anything, know what you already have. QuickBooks Online can send up to three automatic email reminders per invoice, each scheduled a set number of days before or after the due date, within a 90-day window on either side. It is free, it is already connected to your invoices, and for a business with a handful of reliable clients it may be enough.

Its limits are the reason this category exists. Settings are company-wide (every customer gets the same schedule, no exceptions for the strategic account), it only covers invoices you emailed from QuickBooks, it stops after the third reminder, it cannot go past 90 days, and there is no escalation, no SMS, no calls, and no reading of replies. We wrote a separate piece on exactly where these stop, linked below.

Side by side

How do you choose?

Start with your books, not the feature list. Two questions do most of the work.

• Who owns AR today? If the answer is a credit controller with a process, Chaser fits that person. If the answer is you, or a bookkeeper doing it between other things, you want something that runs without being run: Reeve.
• How many invoices are open right now? Under 50, with clients who mostly pay: try QuickBooks' built-in reminders first, or InvoiceSherpa if you want a portal. Over 50, on net-30 to net-90 terms, with a few clients who need a nudge every single time: this is where a tool that escalates and reads replies pays for itself in the first month.

The cheapest tool is the one that gets your invoices paid. Everything else is a subscription.

The bottom line

If you are a B2B service business on QuickBooks Online and you want collections to happen without you, Reeve is built for exactly that, and you can see it work on your own aging report in a free trial. If you have a dedicated AR team and multiple ERPs, Chaser is the mature choice. If you are very small and mostly want a payment portal, InvoiceSherpa will do the job cheaply. And if you have never turned on QuickBooks' own reminders, do that today; it costs nothing and you will learn quickly whether it is enough.