Short answer: sending payment reminders is the easy part. Zoho Books, TallyPrime and now RazorpayX can all send them. The slow part of collections is what comes back: "will pay Friday", "we never got the invoice", "two cartons were short". AI can now read those replies, sort them and route them, so your accounts person spends the day on the five customers who need a call instead of the fifty who just needed a nudge.
The reminder was never the hard part
Ask anyone who runs receivables at a small company what takes their time. It's rarely pressing "send". It's the follow-up after the follow-up. A customer replies on WhatsApp with a promise, another forwards the invoice to their accounts team and goes quiet, a third says the rate is wrong. Each reply needs someone to read it, decide what it means, update a sheet and remember to check again.
This matters in India because a lot of money waits on it. Razorpay's launch note for its RazorpayX agents cites the Ministry of MSME's Annual Report 2025-2026: over ₹8.1 trillion is estimated to be locked in delayed payments to MSMEs.
What your software already does
Before buying anything, check what you already pay for.
Zoho Books. The reminders help page covers automated reminders that go out before or after the due date. You can also record a customer's expected payment date and tick "Don't remind about payment until then", which turns off the regular reminders to that customer until that date. On the AI features page, Zoho's assistant Zia shows invoice insights: customers who have paid less than 70% of their invoice amounts in the past six months, and invoices overdue beyond your organisation's average late payment dates, based on your historical payments. You can ask Zia things like "List invoices that are overdue by 60 days".
TallyPrime. Tally's May 2026 guide explains bill-wise tracking, which follows pending amounts invoice by invoice, and says TallyPrime can send invoices, ledgers and reminder letters as PDF or Excel files through the official WhatsApp Business API.
RazorpayX. On 1 June 2026 Razorpay announced a Receivables Agent for RazorpayX, built into the merchant dashboard. Razorpay says it "automates collections by following up on unpaid invoices and sending timely payment reminders."
So the sending, the ageing view and some of the "who's slipping" signals are already in tools Indian businesses use.
The gap: nobody reads the replies
Here's where many setups stop. The reminder goes out. The reply lands in a shared inbox or someone's WhatsApp. Then it waits.
Today's AI models can do this sorting, and the one-week start below shows how to test it on your own replies. A model can read a short reply and tag it:
- Promise to pay, with a date. Update the expected payment date so the next reminder waits.
- Invoice not received or wrong contact. Resend the invoice to the right person and log the new contact.
- Dispute: short delivery, rate difference, quality issue. Route it to sales or dispatch with the invoice and the delivery note attached.
- Asking for a copy, statement or GST detail. Pull it from the accounts system and send it.
- Silence after three reminders. Put it on a list for a human call.
None of this needs a new accounting system. It sits between your inbox or WhatsApp number and the software you already use. The first version can be as simple as a daily sheet that says, customer by customer, what they said and what happens next. If you want help mapping this to your own process, our page on operations automation shows how we approach it.
Where a person stays in
Collections are about relationships, especially with a customer you've sold to for ten years. We'd keep three things with a person:
- Anything that mentions interest, legal steps or stopping supply. AI can draft it. Someone who knows the customer sends it.
- Disputes. AI can collect the papers. A person decides who's right.
- Your top customers by value. Let AI prepare the summary before the call, then make the call yourself.
Also decide who can see what. If the AI reads replies, it reads everything customers write, including complaints about your team. Keep its access to the collections inbox, not every mailbox.
If you're the one being paid late
If you sell to bigger companies and wait on them, know the rules. The Ministry of MSME's Samadhaan page says a buyer who doesn't pay a micro or small supplier within 45 days of accepting the goods or services owes compound interest, with monthly rests, at three times the bank rate notified by RBI (Section 16 of the MSMED Act, 2006). Any micro or small enterprise with a valid Udyam Registration can apply, and the same page now asks for new delayed-payment applications to be filed on the MSME ODR portal.
As of 5 November 2026, the page shows 2,56,892 applications filed by micro and small enterprises, and ₹32,442.51 crore payable across 117,014 cases filed with the state facilitation councils. If you go this way, AI can help you put the file together: invoices, delivery proofs, reminder history and the customer's replies, in date order. Your CA or lawyer should check it before it goes in.
A one-week start
- Day 1: Export your overdue list. Mark the ten customers who make up most of the amount.
- Day 2: Turn on the reminders your software already has, if they're off.
- Days 3 to 5: Collect last month's replies to reminders, from email and WhatsApp. Sort fifty of them by hand into the tags above. That sorted set is how you'll test any AI tool.
- Days 6 and 7: Run an AI model on the same fifty replies and compare its tags with yours. If it gets most of them right and flags the ones it isn't sure about, connect it to the live inbox, with a person checking its tags for the first month.
Your software can already send the reminder. Reading what comes back is where your accounts team's time goes, so that's the part worth automating next.
Arthat AI
Working on something similar at your company?
Arthat AI builds these automations for Indian businesses every week. If you want to talk through whether this fits your situation, we'll give you a straight answer — even if the answer is "don't build it."
