Five tools carry the wholesale shortlist in 2026. Chaser fits wholesalers wanting one broad AR suite from £199 a month; Paidnice fits $500k to $10m wholesalers on Xero or QuickBooks; Credit Hound fits Sage sites; Satago fits Sage 50 users wanting finance alongside; ezyCollect fits Australian and New Zealand distributors.
None of them stops an order at entry. That is the first thing a wholesaler needs to know, and no ranking page says it.
Key takeaways
A wholesaler has already spent the money before the invoice falls due. The stock was bought, picked and shipped, so only two controls matter: the gate that stops the next despatch, and the charge that makes the outstanding one cost something.
Most comparison pages score reminders, dashboards and integrations. Score these two instead.
Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 s.5A you can claim £40, £70 or £100 per overdue invoice, plus interest at 8 percentage points over base under the 2002 Rate of Interest Order. The question is whether the software posts that as a transaction, or types it into an email.
Apply fees automatically, waive them deliberately with a documented reason. The statutory basics are in the guide to UK late payment fees, and what a goods supplier can charge across four markets is in charging interest on overdue invoices.
QuickBooks Online has no customer credit limit field in its documentation. Xero has one, but its block fires at invoice approval or send, after the pallet has left the yard. Xero has also declined to close the gap: on the Contacts, Automatic Credit Hold and Stop idea it stated on 8 February 2024 that it has no plans to develop it.
Neither ledger has a sales order object or a despatch event, so nothing sitting on top of the ledger can gate an order. Not Chaser, not Paidnice, not any tool here. In an SME the person releasing the pick is the gate, and the sequence for running it is in credit control for wholesalers.
"The fee is in our terms and we have never once charged it" is the most common sentence on our wholesale demo calls. The clause was drafted years ago, the arithmetic is annoying, so nobody ever raises the charge.
Chaser, Paidnice, Credit Hound, Satago and ezyCollect are the five credit control tools a UK wholesaler realistically shortlists, at entry prices from £20 to £199 a month.
Two are ledger-side tools, two are Sage-channel products and one is an Australian order-to-cash suite. Read the credit limit and statutory late fee columns first.
| Tool | Fits | Entry cost | Runs on | Credit limit enforcement | Statutory late fees | Regions | Rated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Chaser | Any mainstream ledger, £1m to £200m turnover | £199 a month to £4m turnover | Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, NetSuite, Dynamics 365 | No evidence found of a native order-entry block | Yes; four calculation types including a UK base rate option, one global rule | UK led, sold internationally | 4.98 (374, Xero App Store) |
| 2. Paidnice | $500k to $10m on Xero or QuickBooks Online | £49 / US$69 a month for 150 invoices | Xero, QuickBooks Online, Stripe, Pinch, HubSpot, Pipedrive | None; charges and chases on the ledger | Yes; flat, percentage or compounding, UK rate auto-indexed to the base rate | UK, AU, NZ, US, CA, ZA | 5.0 (Xero App Store); 4.9 (Capterra) |
| 3. Credit Hound | Wholesalers already running Sage | £20 per user a month on Sage 50, on Draycir's own pricing page | Sage Accounting, Sage 50, 100, 200, Intacct, Infor SunSystems, Xero | Freezes overdue accounts; the host ledger performs the block | No evidence found in vendor documentation | UK led, Sage channel | 5.0 (11, Sage UK Marketplace); 4.5 (1, G2) |
| 4. Satago | Sage 50 wholesalers wanting finance alongside | £25 a month embedded in Sage 50 | Xero, Sage, Sage 50, QuickBooks, KashFlow, FreeAgent | No evidence found; supplies scores and suggested limits | Not verifiable from public materials | UK | Not verified |
| 5. ezyCollect | Australian and New Zealand distributors | About A$275 a month plus setup, annual | MYOB AccountRight, Exo and Essentials, Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP Business One, Pronto Xi | No evidence found; credit insight informs, it does not gate | No evidence found in vendor documentation | AU and NZ led | 4.9 (35, Xero App Store AU); 4.7 (25, G2) |
"No evidence found" means the capability does not appear in that vendor's public documentation, not that the feature is absent. Prices and ratings checked August 2026; verify current pricing on the vendor's site.
Nobody publishes what this costs
Search "credit control software" from the UK and not one page-one result tells a small wholesaler the price. Checking each vendor site in August 2026, Sage, Quadient, Esker, HighRadius and TreviPay all asked for a quote request rather than publishing a figure.
So the entry prices above are the point of this page. A 10 to 50 person wholesaler lands between £20 and £199 a month, not in the enterprise bracket.
Best for wholesalers wanting one broad AR suite, from £199 a month
Chaser is the most established general-purpose receivables suite here: reminders, credit checks, posted letters and a collections route in one product, sold to finance teams across every mainstream ledger.
Test the single global fee rule on the demo. A wholesaler rarely runs one policy: symbol group members, trade counter accounts and one-off buyers need different rules, and here they get the same one.
The honest limitation. One global late-fee rule, no fees on payment-plan or partially-paid invoices, statements monthly only on a fixed day, and an entry price four times the cheapest option here.
Best for wholesalers on Xero or QuickBooks, $500k to $10m turnover
Paidnice is ledger-side credit control: reminder sequences per customer group, late fees, statutory interest, statements and payment plans, all posted into Xero or QuickBooks Online as real transactions.
Customer groups carry their own rules, so a symbol group member on 60 days and a cash account on 30 run different policies at once. Customers cut their average wait for payment in half, within 30 days.
The honest limitation. It does not block an order at entry. It sits on the ledger, not the order book, so the despatch gate stays with your inventory system or a person. It is not a cash-application platform, and it has no built-in credit checks.
Best for wholesalers already running Sage, from £20 per user
Credit Hound is a collections and dispute workbench from Draycir that bolts onto the Sage stack, built around chase cycles, query logging and promise-to-pay tracking.
Disputes and short payments are the wholesale collections problem, and a query log with automatic follow-up is the right shape for them. Sold through a large reseller network, which is how Sage sites buy.
The honest limitation. It chases, it does not charge. No QuickBooks Online, per-user pricing that scales badly past two or three controllers, and a review base of twelve across every platform.
Best for Sage 50 wholesalers wanting credit control and finance together
Satago is a UK hybrid of automated chasing, credit risk data and Lloyds-backed invoice finance, sold most cheaply as an embedded module inside Sage 50.
Price it at the embedded rate, not the standalone one. A Sage 50 wholesaler is looking at £25 to £45 a month, and possibly at nothing, which changes the comparison.
The honest limitation. Late fees, per-group sequences and statement behaviour cannot be verified publicly, so put all three on the demo list. UK only, and the lending side is the commercial centre of gravity.
Best for Australian and New Zealand wholesalers on MYOB or an ERP
ezyCollect is an order-to-cash suite built for the Australian mid-market: reminders, credit insight, a payment portal and payment plans across the widest local ERP list here.
For a distributor on MYOB Exo or Pronto Xi it is often the only tool in this list that connects at all, and that alone usually decides it.
The honest limitation. No late-fee or interest capability appears in vendor documentation. That matters less in Australia, where there is no statutory B2B interest regime, and a great deal if you also invoice UK customers. Expect a setup fee and an annual contract.
A wholesaler on Xero or QuickBooks Online under £10m turnover chooses between Paidnice at £49 and Chaser at £199. A Sage 50 site chooses between Satago at £25 and Credit Hound at £20 per user.
Your ledger narrows the list faster than your revenue does. Start there, then check the price against the size of the credit team.
If you searched for Access Collect, the answer is short. It only runs inside Access Financials and Access Dimensions, so a wholesaler on Sage, Xero or QuickBooks cannot buy it.
A spreadsheet stops paying for itself at roughly 40 overdue accounts a month, or once your debtor days sit ten or more days above your terms. Below both lines it is genuinely the right tool.
The arithmetic, on stated assumptions rather than a vendor study.
The labour line. Four chase touches a month per overdue account, three minutes each to look up, draft, send and log, is 12 minutes per account per month.
40 accounts × 4 touches × 3 minutes = 480 minutes, or 8 hours a month. At £18 an hour fully loaded that is £144 of salaried time, against a £49 entry licence.
The cash line. A £3m wholesaler carries £3,000,000 ÷ 365 = £8,219 of receivables for every single day of debtor days. Ten days above terms is £82,192 sitting in other people's bank accounts.
The labour crossover arrives first, the cash line is the expensive one. The general method is in the DSO calculation formula, and the wholesale version, VAT error and all, is in debtor days for wholesalers.
Three things a spreadsheet cannot do at any size, and all three matter in wholesale.
The wholesalers who get the most from any tool on this page settle four things before they buy: who chases, on what days, what the charge is, and who may waive it. Software makes those decisions repeatable. It does not make them for you.
What does credit control software cost a UK wholesaler?
Published entry prices in August 2026: Credit Hound from £20 per user a month on Sage 50 on Draycir's own pricing page, Satago from £25 embedded in Sage 50, Paidnice from £49 / US$69 for 150 invoices, and Chaser from £199 covering turnover to £4m. ezyCollect starts around A$275 plus setup. The enterprise names publish nothing, so treat any quote-only vendor as a several-thousand-a-year decision.
Can any of these stop an order shipping over the credit limit?
No. None of the five gates order entry, because none owns the order. QuickBooks Online has no credit limit field in its documentation, and Xero's block fires at invoice approval or send, after the goods have gone.
The gate belongs to your inventory or ERP system, or to the person releasing the pick. Sage 200 and NetSuite hold an order automatically once the limit is breached. MYOB prevents further sales, but only once someone sets the credit hold by hand. Xero and QuickBooks Online cannot do either.
Which tools can charge statutory interest and the fixed sums?
Paidnice computes flat, percentage or compounding interest with the UK statutory rate auto-indexed to the base rate, and applies the £40, £70 and £100 fixed sums as an invoice line item. Chaser offers four calculation types including a UK base rate option, under one global rule.
For Credit Hound no interest or late-fee function appears in vendor documentation, Satago's depth is not publicly verifiable, and ezyCollect has none.
Which of these work with QuickBooks Online?
Paidnice, Chaser, Satago and ezyCollect all list QuickBooks. No QuickBooks Online connector was found for Credit Hound, which is the biggest fit gap for a wholesaler not on Sage.
Do I still need this if my inventory system already chases?
Usually yes, because the layers do different jobs. The inventory system holds the order and the credit limit. The ledger holds the invoice, and that is the only place a fee, a statement or statutory interest becomes a real transaction.
Whichever you pick, the tool executes a policy it cannot write for you. The terms, limits and escalation ladder are in the wholesale credit control guide.
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