Can an agent do invoicing?
Yes. Invoicing is the cleanest agent job there is: the inputs are structured, the rules are yours, and the output is checkable in seconds. An agent raises, sends, chases and reconciles invoices end to end.
- Hours back per week
- 6
- Human cost
- €600–1,800/mo of admin time
- Agent cost
- €15–50/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Raise invoices from delivered work
YESPulls hours, milestones or usage, applies the contract terms, produces the invoice.
Send on schedule
YESOn the day you bill, to the right contact, with the PO reference their AP system needs.
Chase late payment
YESEscalating reminders in your tone. Politely at 7 days, firmly at 30, and it tells you before it gets sharper.
Reconcile payments received
YESMatches incoming bank lines to open invoices, including partial and bundled payments.
Handle a billing dispute
HALFIt can assemble the evidence in a minute. Whether you hold the line or credit it is a relationship decision.
- Yours
Deciding to stop work over non-payment
NOT YETNever automate the moment a commercial relationship breaks.
4/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Disputes
- Deciding when to write something off
- The decision to escalate to legal or downing tools
How this goes wrong
An unattended dunning sequence keeps escalating at a client your salesperson is mid-renewal with. The invoice gets paid and the renewal does not. Give the agent visibility of open opportunities, or a rule to pause chasing on named accounts.
What it needs access to
- Xero, QuickBooks or Stripe Billing
- Contract or project system
- Time tracking
- Bank feed
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my billing agent. On the 1st of each month, raise invoices for all delivered work: pull approved time from Harvest and milestones from the project board, apply each client contract in Drive, and produce draft invoices in Xero. Show me the drafts. After I approve, send them to the billing contact with the PO reference on file. Chase unpaid invoices at 7, 14 and 30 days with escalating firmness in my voice — show me the 30-day mail before it sends. Reconcile incoming payments daily, including partials. If a client disputes an invoice, do not reply; assemble the evidence and hand it to me the same day.
Questions people ask
Will an agent send an invoice I did not want sent?
Not if you keep approval on the send step, which for most businesses is the right setting for the first few months. Once you have watched it produce a hundred correct drafts, moving to auto-send with a review window is a reasonable next step.
Can it handle recurring and usage-based billing together?
Yes, and this is where it beats a template. Blended contracts — a retainer plus overage plus a one-off — are exactly the case where a person makes an arithmetic slip and an agent does not.
Does it improve cash collection?
The gain is not clever collections, it is that the chase actually happens every time. Most late payment in small businesses is caused by nobody getting round to sending the second reminder.
Want this one actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Xero, QuickBooks or Stripe Billing and Contract or project system, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up an invoicing agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.