Outstanding invoices ChatGPT: faster insight into your debtors
As an accountant or financial professional, you regularly spend time querying outstanding invoices in Exact Online. With an AI assistant like ChatGPT, this becomes much faster. In this article, we show five practical examples of how to query outstanding invoices via AI - including the exact prompts and what to expect.
Example 1: query all overdue invoices
The most direct question for debtor management:
"Which invoices are past their due date?"
The AI uses the financial_outstanding_get tool and automatically filters for invoices where the due date has passed. You receive an overview with customer name, invoice number, amount and the number of days overdue. This saves you from manually setting filters in Exact Online.
Example 2: debtor ageing analysis by category
For a deeper insight into your debtor portfolio:
"Give me an ageing overview of all outstanding invoices, grouped by 30-day periods"
The AI retrieves all outstanding items and groups them into categories: 0–30 days, 31–60 days, 61–90 days and over 90 days. You immediately see where the greatest risks lie and which customers consistently pay late.
Example 3: compare monthly revenue totals
For periodic reporting, ask:
"What is the total outstanding invoice amount per month for the past six months?"
The AI analyses the invoice dates and groups the amounts by month. This reveals trends: is the outstanding amount increasing or decreasing? This helps you forecast cash flow and adjust your collection policy in time.
Example 4: identify top 10 debtors
Want to know where the largest portion of your outstanding amount sits?
"Who are my top 10 debtors based on outstanding amount?"
The AI ranks your customers by total outstanding amount and shows the top 10. For each customer, you see the number of outstanding invoices, total amount and average payment term. This is essential for risk analysis and prioritising your follow-up actions.
Example 5: generate a reminder overview
For efficiently sending payment reminders:
"Which customers have invoices that are more than 14 days past due and have not yet received a reminder?"
The AI combines information from financial_outstanding_get and filters based on your criteria. You get an action list of customers to contact, including the relevant invoice numbers and amounts. This makes your reminder process more structured and prevents invoices from remaining outstanding for too long.
Get started with outstanding invoices via AI
These five examples demonstrate how powerful the combination of AI and Exact Online is for debtor management. Want more example prompts? Browse the prompt library or read how to query outstanding invoices via ChatGPT for a more comprehensive guide.
Don't have a Ledger Botje account yet? View the plans and start querying your outstanding invoices via ChatGPT today.
What these five have in common
All five are questions you could answer in Exact Online - that is not the point. The point is that each requires its own filter, report or export there, and you do not perform those actions for a question that should take ten seconds.
So you work on assumptions. You think you know who is structurally late. These five questions replace that assumption with a figure, and that is the real return - not the minutes saved.
From figure to conversation
A debtor overview is an intermediate step. The question after it is who you call and about what. Two follow-ups that sharpen it:
"Which of these customers is structurally late, and for which is this the first time?" With the first group the conversation is about the process, with the second about this one invoice.
"Set the outstanding amounts against that customer's revenue this year." An outstanding amount weighs differently for a customer buying ten times as much.
What to watch
A summary makes choices. Before calling or sending a reminder based on an answer, look at the underlying invoices. Has a credit note been settled? Is there a payment arrangement? That context is not automatically in a total.
Reference date. "Outstanding" is a snapshot. For a payment received this morning the answer may lag slightly; verify in Exact Online before confronting someone about an amount that has already arrived.
Draft, not send. The tone of a reminder is a relationship decision. Have a draft made and read it.
Where to go next
To automate further, read how to have reminders written from your bookkeeping. More questions are in the prompt library.