The Invoice That Chased an Already-Paid Customer

A loyal customer got a slightly awkward collections call — "just a friendly reminder that invoice #4471 is 30 days past due" — for an invoice she'd paid three weeks earlier.

Accounting was working off the accounting system. The CRM, which is what triggered the automated reminder, was pulling from a customer record that had never been updated, because payment confirmations lived in a different system that didn't talk to it. Someone has to manually mark invoices paid in two places, and that week, they hadn't gotten to the second one yet.

Nobody's fault, exactly. Just two systems, each telling the truth as far as it knew, and a customer caught in the gap between them — which is never a good place for a customer to be standing.

If a customer paid you today, how many separate places would someone need to update before every system agreed she was paid?