Chaser acts on an overdue invoice and Upflow reports on one. Chaser raises a Bank of England base rate charge itself and prints £199 a month. Upflow measures countback DSO against best possible DSO, hands any late fee back to your ERP, and publishes no price at any tier.
That makes this an unusually clean choice. One product changes what the customer owes; the other changes what the finance team knows. Almost every other row in the table follows from that, including the two prices, because a tool that enforces can be bought on a card and a tool that measures is sold in a meeting.
UK small businesses wait 29.3 days to be paid and settle 8.3 days past due, on Xero Small Business Insights data for June 2026, and a manufacturer waits more than twice as long as a hospitality business. Every one of those figures is a measurement. Not one of them has ever moved an invoice on its own, which is the tension this comparison is built on.
Chaser and Upflow compared: the table
Two rows decide this: what each tool does about a late fee, and what each one prints as a price. Everything after them is a consequence.
 |
 |
|
|---|---|---|
| Revenue fit | £4m and under on the entry tier, tiers to £200m | ARR bands, under $10m to $50m and above |
| From (monthly) | £199 | Not published |
| Billing model | Revenue-tiered, published, with channel credits metered on top | Quoted by ARR band, nothing printed |
| Ledger integrations | Xero, QuickBooks, Sage 50, Sage 200, Sage Intacct, Sage Business Central, NetSuite, Dynamics 365, AccountsIQ, SAP | Xero, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Zuora |
| Late fee grain | Yes (one global rule); four calculation types including the Bank of England base rate | No (via your ERP only) |
| Reminder channels | Email, SMS, letter and automated call, all credit-metered | Email, SMS and letter automatically, calls and tasks as manual steps |
| Statements | Yes (monthly, fixed day) | Not verified |
| Payment plans | Yes (per invoice, weekly to yearly) | No (customer-initiated part payments and promises to pay) |
| Portal | Yes | Yes |
| Credit checks | Yes (Creditsafe) | Yes (light scoring) |
| Collections analytics | Yes (customer insights and DSO, with the receivables forecast as a paid add-on) | Yes (countback DSO against best possible DSO, collection effectiveness, at-risk rate, aging) |
| Rated | 4.98 from 374 on the Xero App Store, 4.5 from 68 on G2, 4.9 from 45 on Capterra | 4.8 from 233 on G2, 4.5 from 15 on Capterra, 5.0 from 1 on the Xero App Store |
| Last verified | Aug 2026 | Aug 2026 |
Three cells carry a fixed meaning. “Not published” is used where the vendor prints no figure of any kind. “Not verified” is used where a capability could not be confirmed from the vendor’s own materials. “None found” is used where nothing in those materials points either way. A figure that is a last-verified third-party number rather than a published one is labelled where it appears.
1. Chaser
Best for UK teams that want Creditsafe credit checking and a statutory interest charge in the same tool, up to £4m on the entry tier
What is it best for?
For a UK credit controller who wants the overdue invoice to end in a charge rather than in a report, on Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or NetSuite.
- Fits
- UK-centred businesses with a named credit controller; the entry tier is priced for £4m turnover and under, and the tiers run to £200m, though Chaser’s own pricing page states £100m
- Regions
- UK-registered, trading since 2014, sells worldwide
- Entry cost
- £199/mo on Compact for turnover to £4m with 4 users, 30 templates, 4 schedules and 100 SMS and 100 call credits; Core £599/mo to £10m; Complete £899/mo above that; Chaser Care, the managed add-on, from £324/mo. As at August 2026, verify current pricing
- Rated
- 4.98 from 374 Xero App Store reviews; 4.5 from 68 on G2; 4.9 from 45 on Capterra, mostly 2020 to 2022
- Awards
- Xero App Partner of the Year 2023
- Runs on
- Xero, QuickBooks, Sage 50, Sage 200, Sage Intacct, Sage Business Central, NetSuite, Dynamics 365, AccountsIQ, SAP, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook
- Statutory late fees
- Yes. Four calculation types including a Bank of England base rate type, recalculated daily, but one global rule only, which cannot vary by schedule or customer group, and no fee is raised on payment-plan or partially paid invoices
- Does best
- Creditsafe credit checking and monitoring in the same tool as email, SMS and letter chasing
Everything Chaser does points at an action taken against an overdue invoice. Reminders leave the controller’s own Gmail or Outlook mailbox on schedules that run before the due date, after it and on payment, with only the final overdue step repeating. SMS, letters, one-way automated calls and manual in-app calls with recording escalate from there, and every channel beyond email is metered in credits, so the bill moves with how hard the account is worked.
The charge is the end of that ladder rather than an add-on to it. Four calculation types are available, one of them follows the Bank of England base rate and recalculates daily, and the fee posts to Xero as an invoice line, which means it appears on the customer’s statement rather than in your reporting.
Around that sit the parts a controller touches daily: a per-customer portal for viewing, paying and raising disputes, per-invoice payment plans from weekly to yearly, monthly statements on a fixed day, Creditsafe checks at one credit in the UK and Ireland and four elsewhere, and a partner collections route once chasing has run out. Payments run through Chaser Pay on Stripe rails, which is mutually exclusive with connecting your own Stripe account.
Limitations with Chaser. The late fee is one global rule for the whole account. It cannot vary by schedule or by customer group, it raises no fee on payment-plan or partially paid invoices, and the line-item sync back to the ledger is Xero only. Statements are monthly on a fixed day with no control over senders or recipients. Payment plan chasing follows the original invoice due date rather than the instalment dates, and Chaser’s own documentation advises chasing instalments by hand. The entry tier covers four users, the price steps with company turnover rather than with usage, and the published revenue caps disagree between the pricing page and the plan detail. Reviewers ask for deeper report customisation and note that replies to a chase cannot be answered directly.
2. Upflow
Best for analytics-led finance teams, ARR bands from under $10m to $50m and above
What is it best for?
For a finance team that will not automate a reminder until it can show what the current process costs, on Xero, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite or Sage Intacct.
- Fits
- B2B finance teams that manage by metric, quoted in ARR bands: under $10m, $10m to $50m, and $50m and above
- Regions
- New York head office, Paris origin, customers in 30-plus countries
- Entry cost
- Not published. Upflow prints no figures and quotes by ARR band; the free Discover tier is analytics only, is not a trial, and has to be arranged through sales. Grow was last verified at $440 a month and Scale at $880. As at August 2026, verify current pricing
- Rated
- 4.8 from 233 G2 reviews, latest June 2026; 4.5 from 15 on Capterra · Xero App Store listing
- Awards
- Not published
- Runs on
- Xero, QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Zuora
- Statutory late fees
- No, via your ERP only. Upflow's own documentation points the job back to the ERP and there is no native computation
- Does best
- Collections analytics, with countback DSO against best possible DSO, collection effectiveness and an at-risk rate above 90 days
Upflow’s argument is that a collections process nobody has measured cannot be improved on purpose, and its metrics are the sharpest thing either product has: countback DSO set against best possible DSO, collection effectiveness, at-risk balances above 90 days, aging and billing-cohort cash forecasting, on dashboards filtered by workflow, country or account manager and scheduled out by email. Discover, the free tier, hands over the numbers and chases nobody.
Chasing sits on top of the measurement rather than beside it. Multi-step workflows mix email, SMS, letter, call and task actions, with only the first three sending by themselves, and timing is set against invoice age, customer behaviour and risk profile rather than one cadence for everybody. Cash application matches incoming payments with suggestions and rules, and an agent reconciles from an uploaded bank CSV.
Its release cadence on AI is the fastest here: promise-to-pay detection in December 2025, dispute-signal detection in February 2026, custom-field autofill in July 2026, and a server that lets an assistant query live receivables data in beta from June 2026. All of it reads the ledger. None of it charges anybody.
Limitations with Upflow. No native late fees, so any charge goes back to your ERP, and no interest calculation of any kind. No instalment plans at all: a customer can make a part payment or record a promise to pay, and nothing else is scheduled. Statement generation is not documented as a feature. Automatic actions fire once a day at a fixed time, on business days only. Sending through your own SMTP disables open and click tracking, and the QuickBooks link is one-way, polls every five minutes rather than using webhooks, caps custom fields at three, and lands payments in Undeposited Funds for manual reconciliation. No price is published at any tier, and the free tier has to be arranged through a salesperson.
A charge, or a measurement
Put one £6,000 invoice on 30-day terms through both products and the two philosophies stop being abstract at about day 30.
One overdue invoice, followed through both products. One of them changes what the customer owes. The other changes what you know about it.
Neither behaviour is wrong, and a team that buys the wrong one has usually bought for the wrong stage. If nobody in the business can say what the current DSO is, a charge is being bolted onto a process that has never been looked at. If everybody can say what it is and it has not moved in four quarters, another dashboard will not move it either.
One global rule (Chaser)
- Four calculation types, the base rate among them
- Recalculated daily
- The same rate applied to every customer
- Nothing charged on a plan or a part-paid invoice
- Line-item sync back to Xero only
Back to the ERP (Upflow)
- No native computation at all
- The charge is raised in NetSuite, not in Upflow
- Nothing tracks the base rate
- No fixed compensation handling
- Reporting only, after the fact
The same row read twice. Chaser computes the charge, posts it and lets you trade it away. Upflow watches a charge that somebody else raised in the ERP.
What countback DSO tells you that a fee cannot
Countback DSO is the metric Upflow is built around, and it deserves a paragraph before it is written off as a dashboard.
A standard DSO divides the receivable balance by revenue and multiplies by days, which smears one slow month across a fast one and flatters a business with rising sales. A countback works backwards through the ledger, taking the outstanding balance out of the most recent period first, so what comes out is how long the money actually took rather than an average of the whole book.
Upflow reports that against a best possible DSO, which is the figure you would see if every customer paid exactly on terms. The gap between the two is the part of the delay that is yours to act on, and it is the only number on this page that tells you whether chasing harder is worth doing at all.
Around it sit collection effectiveness, an at-risk rate above 90 days, aging and billing-cohort forecasting. Chaser reports customer insights and DSO, and charges £9 a month for the receivables forecast and £20 for the cash flow forecast, so the measurement side is present but priced as an extra rather than built as the product.
What none of it does is change the amount owed. A measurement tells you the account is 40 days late. A charge tells the customer.
Buying from a vendor that publishes no price
One of these two prints its price and one does not, and that is a buying criterion in its own right rather than an inconvenience to work around.
Chaser prints £199 a month on Compact for turnover to £4m, £599 on Core to £10m and £899 on Complete above that, with Chaser Care from £324 a month and channel credits metered on top. A finance manager can put those figures into a budget line before speaking to anybody.
Upflow prints nothing on any tier and quotes by ARR band. The $440 figure for Grow and $880 for Scale were last verified in August 2026 and are not published by the vendor, so they are a starting point for a conversation rather than a price. Even the free Discover tier has to be arranged through a salesperson, and Upflow states it is not a trial.
The cost of that to a buyer is comparability. A quote arrives shaped by what the salesperson learned about your ARR on the discovery call, so the number you are given is not the number another company in the same band is given, and there is nothing printed to hold the vendor to at renewal.
It also removes the cheap first step. Software with a printed price can be signed off by one person, tried for a month and cancelled. Software without one needs a meeting, a demo and an internal case before anyone has seen it run against a real ledger.
If you shortlist Upflow anyway, ask for three things in writing: the band you sit in, the rate at the top and the bottom of that band, and what happens to the price on the day your ARR crosses into the next one.
Where the Late Payment Act lands when the software only reports
A UK supplier already holds this entitlement. The only question is which system is holding it for them.
Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 a UK business can charge interest on an overdue B2B invoice at 8% a year above the Bank of England base rate, plus a fixed sum of £40, £70 or £100 by size of debt. With the base rate at 3.75% in mid-2026 that is 11.75% in total, and it moves, so read the current figure off GOV.UK before you invoice for it.
The rate moving is what makes this software work instead of spreadsheet work. An invoice left long enough spans two or three base rates, and the charge has to be prorated across each period at the rate that applied. Chaser recalculates daily and posts the answer. Upflow’s own documentation sends the job to NetSuite, so on a Xero or QuickBooks Online ledger the calculation, the posting and the audit trail all sit outside the tool that is running the chase.
- Statutory interest
- Base rate plus 8%, which came to 11.75% in mid-2026. The figure tracks the base rate, so read it again on the day you raise the charge. GOV.UK
- Fixed compensation
- A per-invoice sum of £40, £70 or £100, set by how large the debt is and claimable in addition to the interest. GOV.UK
- Mandatory interest
- Proposed rather than enacted. The Commercial Payments Bill would turn statutory interest into a requirement in commercial contracts instead of a default two parties can contract out of. Check where the Bill has reached before you plan around it.
The entitlement is also the only lever a controller has, and one of these two products puts it in their hand. A charge sitting on the customer’s ledger can be waived deliberately, in writing, in exchange for payment today. An account where the charge was never raised has nothing to trade.
A £5,000 invoice left 45 days past due at 11.75% carries £72.43 of statutory interest, and the fixed sum on a debt that size is £70, giving £142.43 claimable.
The interest is the invoice value at the annual rate, apportioned across the days the money was late. The fixed sum steps at £40 below £1,000, £70 from there to £9,999.99, and £100 at £10,000 and above. The rate follows the Bank of England base rate, so check GOV.UK before you invoice for it.
Common questions
What buyers ask once both products are on the same shortlist: what the quote-only price means in practice, which tool charges interest, and which one reports better.
Is Chaser or Upflow better?
Neither is better outright. Chaser is stronger on enforcement and credit risk: it applies a Bank of England base rate charge, runs Creditsafe credit checks and monitoring, and publishes its price from £199 a month. Upflow is stronger on measurement: countback DSO against best possible DSO, collection effectiveness, at-risk balances and cash forecasting, with no price published at any tier.
How much do Chaser and Upflow cost?
Chaser is £199 a month on Compact for turnover up to £4m, £599 on Core to £10m and £899 on Complete above that, with Chaser Care from £324 a month and channel credits charged on top. Upflow publishes no price and quotes by ARR band; Grow was last verified at $440 a month and Scale at $880. Both figures are as at August 2026; verify current pricing.
Why does Upflow not publish a price?
Upflow removed its figures from its site and now quotes by ARR band, and even the free Discover tier is arranged through sales rather than signed up for. The practical effect is that no two buyers in the same band can compare what they were quoted, and there is no printed rate to hold the vendor to at renewal.
Do Chaser and Upflow apply UK statutory interest?
Chaser does. It offers four calculation types including a Bank of England base rate type, recalculated daily, as one global rule that cannot vary by schedule or customer group, and it raises no fee on payment-plan or partially paid invoices. Upflow does not: its documentation points the job back to your ERP and there is no native computation.
Which has better credit checking, Chaser or Upflow?
Chaser. Its in-app credit report is supplied by Creditsafe and carries a credit score with a recommended limit, the customer’s payment score, credit event history, and Companies House filing and director data, plus continuous monitoring and a late payment predictor. Upflow offers light customer scoring and risk-profile segmentation rather than bureau data.
Which has better reporting, Chaser or Upflow?
Upflow. It reports countback DSO against best possible DSO, collection effectiveness, an at-risk rate above 90 days, aging and billing-cohort cash forecasting, on dashboards filtered by workflow, country or account manager. Chaser reports customer insights and DSO, and charges £9 a month for the receivables forecast and £20 for the cash flow forecast.
Do Chaser and Upflow work with Xero and QuickBooks?
Both do. Chaser adds the whole Sage range, NetSuite, Dynamics 365, AccountsIQ and SAP. Upflow adds NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Stripe Billing, Chargebee and Zuora, which is the row that decides it for a subscription business billing outside a general ledger. Confirm your exact ledger before committing.
Does either tool offer payment plans?
Chaser does, splitting an invoice from weekly through to yearly, though its chasing follows the original invoice due date rather than the instalment dates. Upflow does not: it offers customer-initiated part payments and promises to pay instead.
Five things this comparison scored, in order
The order above came out of five questions, asked in this sequence. The evidence for each answer sits in the entries rather than being asserted here.
- Does the tool act on an overdue invoice, or describe it? Chaser raises the charge. Upflow reports on a charge raised somewhere else.
- What does the vendor actually print? £199 a month against no figure at any tier.
- How much verified review evidence stands behind it, and how recent is it? 4.98 from 374 on the Xero App Store against 4.8 from 233 on G2, with Chaser’s Capterra base mostly 2020 to 2022.
- What does it reach beyond the ledger you already run? Chaser takes the accounting systems, including the whole Sage range. Upflow takes Stripe Billing, Chargebee and Zuora.
- Can the business be served at its current size, at a price it can sign off? Answerable for Chaser and not for Upflow, which is a finding rather than a hole in the research.
Where a capability exists in one product and has no counterpart in the other, it is stated inside that product’s entry rather than used to move the order. Prices were read from each vendor’s own site in August 2026, in the currency the vendor prints, with no conversion applied, and last-verified third-party figures are labelled wherever they appear. Neither vendor paid to be here and neither saw this page before it was published.
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