Debt collection software that collects for you

1. 01

   Load the overdue invoices

   INV-2043 $4,200 30d

   INV-1988 $860 62d

   INV-2101 $13,400 9d

   Type one in, paste a list, upload a CSV, or connect your accounting system on the Pro plan and let DebtAgent pull the aging report every morning. Each invoice becomes a debt record attached to a debtor: name, billing contact, amount, due date, days past due.

   The one thing worth doing properly here is the billing contact. A cadence aimed at the wrong inbox is a cadence aimed at nothing, and it is the most common reason a recovery attempt quietly fails.

2. 02

   Pick a tone and a jurisdiction

   Friendly Firm Final

   Jurisdiction: US · FDCPA + Reg F

   Friendly, Firm or Final sets where the cadence starts on the tone ladder. Jurisdiction sets the rule pack: US FDCPA and Regulation F baseline on every plan, state-specific packs on Plus and above, custom jurisdictions on Enterprise. That is the entire configuration.

   You are not writing templates and you are not building a workflow diagram. Two dropdowns, and the agent handles the rest. If you want to edit the copy, you can, and the compliance checks re-run on what you wrote.

3. 03

   The agent runs the cadence

   1

   Email sent

   Day 0

   2

   Email sent

   Day 5

   3

   SMS queued

   Day 10

   It drafts every touch, schedules each one, checks the rules before every send, holds messages outside contact hours until the window opens, switches to SMS when email goes quiet, escalates as the debt ages, and offers a payment plan at the point where a plan is more likely to land than a demand.

   Every message carries a hosted payment link, so the debtor can settle in one click instead of asking you for wire details and losing another week to that exchange.

4. 04

   Money lands, sequence stops

   INV-2043

   $4,200

   Recovered

   Cadence auto-stopped, 6 sends cancelled

   The payment event halts the cadence within seconds. Queued sends are cancelled. The debt is stamped recovered, the debtor gets a receipt, and you get the cash. If the debtor disputes instead of paying, collection pauses and the dispute path opens automatically.

   The compliance log keeps everything: what was sent, when, under which rule, and what was blocked. Export it as CSV or PDF whenever an auditor, a lawyer or a nervous board member asks.

Pricing and capability details above reflect publicly stated positioning at the time of writing. Contingency rates vary by account age, balance and volume, and agencies quote individually. Check current terms with each vendor before you decide. We would rather you buy the right thing than buy ours.

DSO Days Sales Outstanding

The average number of days it takes you to get paid after you invoice. Compute it as accounts receivable divided by total credit sales, multiplied by the number of days in the period. If DSO is 52 and your terms are net 30, you are financing your customers for three weeks for nothing. Every day you take off DSO releases roughly one day of revenue in working capital, permanently, and this is the metric a CFO will judge a collections tool by.

FDCPA Fair Debt Collection Practices Act

The 1977 federal law that governs how debts can be collected. It bans harassment, false or misleading representations, and unfair practices. Statutory damages run to $1,000 per action plus actual damages, costs and the other side's legal fees. It applies principally to third-party collectors of consumer debt, but the safest posture, and ours, is to write every message as if it applied to you.

Regulation F 12 CFR Part 1006

The CFPB rule that put hard edges on the FDCPA, effective November 2021. It gave us the seven-in-seven call cap, formal rules for email and text contact, a required validation notice with itemization, and a clear process for debtors to say stop. If somebody says their collection tool is FDCPA-aware but cannot tell you what Regulation F changed, they are quoting a statute they have not read since 2020.

Validation notice The debt itemization

The written notice a collector must provide, generally in or within five days of the initial communication, telling the consumer the amount, the creditor, an itemization from a reference date, and how to dispute. Regulation F gives a model form with a safe harbor. If you send a validation notice and the consumer disputes in writing within 30 days, you must stop collecting until you mail verification.

Mini-Miranda The debt-collector disclosure

The sentence that has to appear in the first communication and, in a modified form, in every subsequent one: this is an attempt to collect a debt and any information obtained will be used for that purpose. It is called the mini-Miranda because everyone finds it slightly theatrical and nobody gets to skip it. Every message DebtAgent drafts carries it automatically.

Right to cure The pre-action window

In several states and in specific regulated categories such as utilities, credit and residential leases, you must send a notice and then wait a defined period, giving the debtor the chance to bring the account current, before you may act further. Miss the notice or shorten the window and the later action is void. This is exactly the kind of rule that gets encoded in a jurisdiction rule pack rather than trusted to memory.

Seven-in-seven The call frequency cap

Under Regulation F, a collector is presumed to violate the harassment rule if it places more than seven call attempts within seven consecutive days about a particular debt, or calls within seven days of having a telephone conversation about that debt. It is a presumption, not an absolute ceiling, but crossing it is a decision to litigate about your own dialling pattern. The agent counts.

Contact window Inconvenient time or place

Contacting a consumer before 8am or after 9pm in their local time is presumptively inconvenient and therefore prohibited. In practice, the hard part is not the rule, it is knowing the debtor's local time. If you have ever sent a collections email at 11pm because that is when you got angry, the machine sending it at 9:12am the next morning is a compliance feature and also a conversion feature.

Cease communication The stop request

If a consumer notifies you in writing to stop contacting them, you must stop, with narrow exceptions such as telling them you are ending contact or that a specific legal remedy is being invoked. Under Regulation F this extends to opting out of a specific medium, so a STOP reply to a text is binding for texts. Ignoring one of these is the single easiest way to convert a debt into a lawsuit.

Charge-off The accounting write-off

The point at which you move a receivable off the books as uncollectible, typically at 120 or 180 days depending on your policy. It does not mean the debt is forgiven and it does not mean you cannot still collect it. It does mean you have publicly given up, which is usually the moment somebody suggests placing it with an agency at a contingency rate that reflects how bad the paper now looks.

Contingency rate What an agency keeps

The percentage of recovered funds a collection agency retains as its fee, typically 15% to 30%, rising with account age and falling with volume and balance size. It is a genuinely fair model for hard paper: no recovery, no fee, and the agency carries the risk and the licensing. It is a terrible model for a 40-day invoice from a customer who simply had not been asked properly.

Promise to pay The PTP

A debtor's commitment to pay a specific amount on a specific date. Tracking these is most of what collections operations software does, because a broken promise is a much stronger signal than silence, and a kept promise means every scheduled message must stop immediately. In DebtAgent, an accepted plan creates a promise record and suspends the cadence until the promise is kept or broken.

Dunning The reminder sequence

The polite old word for chasing money, still used in subscription billing to mean the automated retry-and-email sequence that runs after a card fails. Dunning software is where most companies start and where most companies stop, because a dunning sequence has no escalation ladder, no channel switching, no compliance layer, and no ability to negotiate a plan.

Aging report The AR aging bucket list

Your receivables sorted into buckets: current, 1 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90, and 90 plus. It is the single most useful document in collections and most finance teams look at it once a month, which is roughly eleven times a month less often than they should. DebtAgent reads it every morning and starts a cadence on anything that crosses your threshold.

Skip tracing Finding the debtor

The process of locating a debtor who has moved, changed number or gone dark. It is a core agency service, it is regulated, and we do not do it. If your debtor has genuinely vanished, an agency with skip-tracing capability is the right call, and we will say so rather than sell you a cadence that lands in a dead inbox nine times.

Third-party disclosure Section 805(b)

Telling anyone other than the consumer, their spouse, or their attorney that the consumer owes a debt. It is prohibited, and it includes leaving a voicemail that a coworker might hear and mentioning it to a receptionist. This is a rule people break constantly and casually, usually while trying to be helpful, and it is one of the reasons an agent that only ever writes to the designated contact is safer than a well-meaning human.

None of this is legal advice, and the summaries above are deliberately simplified. State law can be stricter than federal law and regulated categories carry their own rules. We write about the practical side of this in more depth on the blog, including a full walkthrough of what you can and cannot put in a collection letter.