Collecter

The gap

The invoice is the easy part.

There is a gap between the invoice existing and the invoice being paid, and in a small firm that gap is filled by the owner remembering to follow up. The work is unpleasant, it slips, and every week it slips costs money the firm has already earned. Most invoicing tools stop at invoice sent. Collecter starts there.

How it works

Send it, then stop thinking about it.

• Send. Drop in a PDF and Collecter reads the fields, or type it into a five-step wizard. The client gets an email with a link to a signed invoice page -- no login, ever.
• Chase. Reminder schedules built from day offsets around the due date, with tone grading from courtesy to final, send windows, quiet hours, and business days only.
• Take payment. Stripe card and ACH, LawPay card and eCheck, PayPal, or an offline payment recorded by hand. Part payments where the firm allows them, late fees where it wants them.
• Close. Payment stops the chase, stamps a fresh copy of the PDF with a red PAID mark, and emails a receipt with the stamped copy attached. The original file is never modified.

Autopay -- on Stripe

A card on file, without ever holding a card.

A client puts a card on file through a link the firm emails, straight into the Stripe form -- the site never receives a card number and has nowhere to type one in. A plan then bills on a schedule: an amount, a frequency, and an ending. Each cycle writes the invoice, sends it, then charges the card. Autopay runs on Stripe today.

For law firms

Client trust money is handled as client money.

A trust deposit can only be paid through the gateway allowed to hold client funds, never through the operating account. It carries no sales tax, accrues no late fees, is excluded from revenue figures, cannot be part-paid, and cannot be deleted. Collecter was built for and runs inside a working law firm, which is why this behaviour is real rather than decorative.

What it plugs into

It lives inside FluentCRM, not beside it.

The payer is a CRM contact, and the contact timeline gets exactly two notes per invoice: one when it goes out, one when it is paid. Reports export to CSV, Excel, and QuickBooks, Desktop and Online. Payments run on Stripe, LawPay, and PayPal. No build step, no external services beyond the gateways -- it runs on WP-Cron.

Straight answers

What it is not.

• Not accounting software. No general ledger and no chart of accounts. Exports feed a bookkeeper; they do not replace one.
• No time or expense capture. Collecter accepts finished invoices; it does not track hours.
• One currency per site, no conversion.
• Single site today; multisite is untested.
• The AI reads fields off an uploaded PDF and asks the operator to confirm each one. It is optional.