Chaser vs Paidnice in 2026

Both of these tools raise a late fee on their own, and both print a price. That is rare enough that this comparison can skip the question every other one has to start with. Chaser runs four calculation types under a single global rule and adds Creditsafe credit checking, posted letters and automated calls, from £199 a month excluding VAT. Paidnice runs a separate fee and interest policy under each customer group and posts the charge to the ledger in Xero or QuickBooks Online, from $69 a month.

So the argument is not whether the software charges. It is how many different rules can be true at the same time, what happens to an invoice that is half paid or sitting on a plan, and which meter the bill runs on: Chaser reads your company turnover, Paidnice reads your invoice count.

Both tools charge a late fee. Only one of them charges more than one.

Chaser’s fee is an account-wide setting. Paidnice’s fee is a property of a customer group, and one ledger can hold several groups at once.

A single rule is fine while every customer is the same kind of customer. Few ledgers are like that. A trade account on 30-day terms, a retail account paying on receipt and an account in dispute all sit in the same aged debtors report, and a 2% charge applied to all three is either too blunt for the first or unusable for the last.

Chaser offers four calculation types, one of them indexed to the Bank of England base rate and recalculated daily, and applies whichever you pick across the whole account. Paidnice attaches the policy to a customer group instead, so the wholesale group, the retail group and the disputed-accounts group each carry their own rate, and an invoice late fee and a statement interest charge can both run on the same group.

The arithmetic underneath is identical in both products, and it is worth writing out once before the configuration section uses it twice. On $12,000 overdue for 30 days, a 2% invoice late fee is $240.00 and statement interest at 12% a year is $118.36, so $358.36 is added to the ledger.

Chaser and Paidnice compared: the table

Both apply a charge themselves, both take payment and both run a customer portal. What separates them is the grain of the fee, the ledgers each reaches, credit data, and what the pricing is metered on.

“Not verified” means the capability could not be confirmed from the vendor’s public materials. “Not published” means the vendor does not print a price. “None found” means no evidence either way. Prices are the vendor’s published or last-verified from-price on the date shown.

Setting up a 2% wholesale fee and no retail fee, in each product

One policy, written down before either product is opened: 2% on invoices to trade accounts once they are 14 days overdue, nothing on retail, and nothing at all on an account already paying by instalments.

In Chaser

You pick one of the four calculation types and set the rate. The setting is account-wide, so the real choice is which half of the ledger to get wrong: charge 2% and the retail accounts get it too, or charge nothing and the trade accounts keep the free credit. There is no schedule-level or group-level variant of the rule. The one clause Chaser satisfies for free is the third, because it raises no fee at all on payment-plan or partially paid invoices. If you want the fee to land as a line item on the ledger, that sync works on Xero and not on QuickBooks.

In Paidnice

You build the trade group, attach a percentage policy at 2% with a 14-day trigger, and leave the retail group with no fee policy on it. A second policy, statement interest on the whole overdue balance, can sit on the same trade group. Accounts on a payment plan come off the fee policy while the reminder ladder keeps running, and a single disputed invoice is excluded by its reference without moving the customer out of the group. The charge is raised as a Draft or an Approved invoice on the ledger.

Now run the policy over a mixed month of 40 overdue invoices, 20 trade and 20 retail, each at $12,000 and 30 days late. Chaser’s one global rule produces 40 charges of $240.00, or none, depending on which way you set it: $9,600 raised against customers you never meant to charge, or nothing raised at all. Paidnice’s two groups produce 20 charges of $240.00 and 20 of nothing, so $4,800 lands where the policy said it should. The difference is not the rate. It is how many customers you had to charge in order to charge the ones you meant.

What happens to a part-paid invoice, and to one on a plan

This is where two working fee engines stop behaving alike, and neither behaviour is documented on the pricing page.

Chaser raises no fee on an invoice that has been partly paid, and none on an invoice sitting on a payment plan. A customer who pays £2,000 of a £10,000 invoice on the due date takes the remaining £8,000 out of the fee’s reach for as long as it stays overdue. Chaser splits an invoice into instalments from weekly through to yearly, but the chasing still follows the original invoice due date rather than the instalment dates, and its own documentation advises chasing the instalments by hand. Plans are not available on the trial, on the Custom tier or alongside Chaser Care.

Paidnice computes statement interest on the overdue balance rather than the invoice face value, so the part payment reduces the charge instead of removing it, and the balance is netted against any credit on the account. A plan is a deliberate exclusion rather than a side effect of the fee model: the account comes off the fee policy and stays on the reminders, with deposits, instalments and auto-pay running through Stripe or Pinch Payments.

Neither answer is wrong, and they answer different questions. Chaser reads a part payment as good faith and stops charging. Paidnice reads the unpaid balance as the thing being charged for and keeps going. Decide which of those two sentences describes your customers before you decide on the software.

The growth penalty: what each tool costs at £500k, £4m and £10m

Chaser meters on company annual revenue. Paidnice meters on how many invoices you raise in a month. The two curves cross, and where they cross depends on your average invoice size rather than your turnover.

At £500k. Chaser is £199 a month on Compact, the same £199 it charges a business eight times larger, because Compact covers everything to £4m. Paidnice at that size is usually Essentials at $69 for 150 invoices a month, or £49 on the UK price table. Chaser costs roughly four times as much here, and the difference buys credit checking, posted letters and automated calls.

At £4m. Chaser is still £199, which is the best value anywhere in its own range and the point at which a turnover meter works in the buyer’s favour. Paidnice has moved with the invoice count by then, to Pro from $99 at 300 invoices or $179 at 600. This is the crossing point, and invoice size decides which side you land on: a £4m consultancy raising 200 large invoices a month pays Chaser more, and a £4m distributor raising 2,000 small ones pays Paidnice more.

At £10m. Chaser steps to Core at £599, which adds unlimited users, templates and schedules, 600 credits, multi-entity and call recording, and then to Complete at £899 covering to £200m. Paidnice steps only when the invoices do, reaching $799 at 4,000 a month and Custom from $999 above that. A £10m business raising 200 invoices a month pays Chaser £599 and Paidnice $99 for the same twelve months of work.

Two extras belong in the same budget line. Chaser’s AR forecast and cash flow forecast are £9 and £20 a month on top, extra templates or schedules £5, and every chasing channel and credit check is metered. Paidnice meters SMS at $0.10 and charges $29 a month for each further Xero or QuickBooks Online organisation, and bills from a fixed local price table rather than an FX conversion. Neither vendor pays to be here; both prices were read off their own pricing pages in August 2026, and Chaser’s entry price rose roughly four to five times when it moved off its old invoice tiers, so confirm it before you budget on it.

Credit checking against enforcement: preventing the debt or pricing it

Chaser sells a decision you make before the invoice exists. Paidnice sells a consequence that attaches after it goes unpaid. Only one of the two is a fee, and neither is a substitute for the other.

Screening reduces the number of accounts that can go bad. Chaser’s in-app Creditsafe report gives a score with a recommended limit, the customer’s payment score, credit event history and Companies House filing and director data, monitored continuously, with a Late Payment Predictor reading historical payment patterns, invoice details and due dates. If the pattern you keep hitting is a customer who was never good for the money, that is the half of the problem worth buying.

A posted charge changes what lateness costs a customer who is already late. It arrives in their payables, ages on their own aged payables report, and can be waived deliberately, in writing, in exchange for payment today, which is a negotiating position a reminder does not give you. If the pattern you keep hitting is a good customer who pays everyone else first, that is the half worth buying.

Neither product is a debt collection agency. Chaser hands an unpaid invoice to a collections partner from inside the tool, on success fees that step down with the size of the debt. Paidnice escalates through manual task workflows inside your own ledger and leaves the handover to you. Both stop where an account is written off, and both are cheaper than getting there.

UK statutory interest, and which product applies it to which invoice

Chaser is a UK vendor priced in pounds and both products document a Bank of England base rate calculation, so the statutory question carries more weight on this pairing than on any other in the category.

Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 a UK business can charge 8% a year above the Bank of England base rate on an overdue B2B invoice, plus a fixed sum of £40, £70 or £100 by size of debt. The entitlement exists whether or not your terms mention it, and the base rate moves, so check the current figure on GOV.UK before you invoice for it.

Chaser runs the base rate type as one global rule, recalculated daily and applied across the account. Paidnice runs it as a policy under a customer group, applying the correct base rate for each period an invoice spans, so an invoice that stayed overdue across a rate change is charged at both rates rather than at whichever one happens to be current when the charge fires.

Statutory interest is the one case where a single account-wide rule is a reasonable fit, because the entitlement is the same for every B2B customer you have. It stops fitting the moment you want a commercial rate on some accounts and only the statutory minimum on others, which is the same grain problem the configuration section above walks through.

What buyers ask when they have shortlisted exactly these two

The questions that come up once a UK credit team has narrowed it to this pair and has to write the difference down for whoever signs the budget.

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