This article walks through the Adfin Console at console.adfin.com: the side menu, the detail drawer, the activity log, the status groups, and how the tables work.

The side menu

Everything starts from the side menu on the left. It's grouped into three blocks plus a row of bottom items. From top to bottom:

Home and Customer agents. Your overview and your automation control panel.
View. The lists where you find your data: Payments, Schedules, Customers, Transactions.
Create. Shortcuts to make a new invoice, payment, or customer.
Bottom items. Referrals, Settings, Get Help.

A separate purple Merge suggestions card may also appear in the side menu if Adfin has spotted likely duplicate customers. See How to merge duplicate customers.

Home

The Home page is your dashboard. It has two halves: an Overview on the left listing things Adfin wants you to look at, and a set of Widgets on the right showing the headline numbers for your business.

The Overview

The Inbox is a single feed of two kinds of item:

Tasks. Things that need an action from you. For example, a mandate that's been cancelled and could be reinstated, a customer that is missing contact details...
Notifications. Read-only updates about things that have happened. For example, a payment that's just landed or a recurring schedule that's finished.

Every item has a status: Open (waiting on you), Done (you actioned it), or Archived (dismissed). You can filter the Inbox by status and by item type.

What you'll see in the Inbox

Common items, grouped by what they're about:

Mandates. Mandate cancelled by the bank, mandate signed, mandate not signed, Direct Debit collection failed, mandate migration started or finished.
Accounting sync. Failed to import an invoice from Xero or QuickBooks, failed to export a payment back, lost connection with your accounting platform.
Customer queries. A customer's submitted a correction via their payment portal, or marked a bank transfer as paid and needs you to confirm.
Email and contact. An email Adfin tried to send bounced, an invoice was imported without a valid email, or your email provider has lost authorisation.
Payments. A payment's been received, a recurring schedule has finished, a payment request that was already out has been edited and may need resending.

What you can do with an item

Some items also have a one-click action built in, so you can resolve them without leaving Home:

Reinstate mandate on a cancelled-mandate task. See How to reinstate a cancelled Direct Debit mandate.
Reconnect on a disconnected-accounting-platform task. Kicks off the Xero or QuickBooks re-auth flow.
Retry on a failed import or export task.
Update contact details on a failed-email task, so the next attempt has somewhere to send to.

The performance widgets

The right side of Home has the headline numbers for your business. Each widget covers a rolling window (you can switch between 30, 60, and 90 days). The widgets are:

Credit Control. A breakdown of receivables by health: Expected (on track), Confirmed (paid), At risk (something needs your attention).
Performance. Your paid-late rate, with an Adfin benchmark next to it (see below).
Active customers. Active and new customer counts over the window.
Total position. What's owed to you, what's in flight, what's been received.
Paid late by payment method. The same paid-late picture, broken out by Bank transfer, Card, Direct Debit, and External payments.

Click any number on a widget to drill into the underlying list. For example, clicking the "At risk" count opens the Customers list pre-filtered to at-risk customers.

The Adfin paid-late benchmark

The Performance Analytics widget shows two numbers side by side:

Your paid-late rate. The share of invoices (and the share of total amount) that landed after their due date over the window.
The Adfin benchmark. The average paid-late rate across other Adfin billers for the same period. It's a quick way to see whether your getting-paid-late problem is bigger or smaller than typical.

The widget also shows the change, so you can see whether things are getting better or worse.

The Paid Late by Payment Method widget goes a layer deeper. For each method (Bank, Card, Direct Debit, External) it shows:

The total amount paid through that method.
The amount that landed late, and the percentage of payments that landed late.
If you also take payments outside Adfin, a comparison against your external payment rate.

Customer agents

Customer agents let you automate payment reminders and credit control, personalised to how each of your customers pays. You can use them with On Demand payments (bank payments, card, Apple Pay, Google Pay) and Auto Collect payments (Direct Debit).

For a full walkthrough, see Introducing customer agents, and Personalised chasing with customer agents for tuning the messages.

View: Payments, Schedules, Customers, Transactions

The View section has the four main lists in Adfin.

Payments

Every invoice and payment request lives here. Use this list to see what's outstanding, send a chase, or take action on a specific payment.

Each row shows the customer, the amount, the due date, the payment method, and the status. Click a row to open the payment in the detail drawer.

Schedules

Anything that recurs (recurring invoices & recurring payments) has its template stored here. Edit a template here to change every future occurrence at once.

Each row is one schedule. As with any list in Adfin, you can show or hide columns to suit how you work. Schedule statuses are Draft (not yet active), Active (running), Cancelled, or Finished.

Click a row to open the schedule's detail page, where you can edit the template, cancel it, or end it. See Set up a recurring invoice, Set up a recurring payment request.

Customers

One row per customer. From here you can drill into a customer to see their payment history, mandate, contacts, and the chasing rules applied to them.

Expanding a row. Click the chevron at the start of a customer row to expand it inline and see that customer's outstanding payments without opening the drawer. Click the chevron again to collapse it. Useful when you want a quick look across several customers at once.

Opening the customer drawer. Click anywhere else on the row to open the customer's detail drawer. The drawer has tabs across the top:

Overview. Profile details, contact information, mandate status, financial snapshot.
Payments. Every invoice and payment request for this customer.
Schedules. Any recurring invoices or payment schedules attached to this customer.
Control Agent. The customer agent assigned to this customer.
Activity. Timeline of everything that's happened on this customer.

Filtering the list. Use the filter bar above the table to narrow down. Common filters include customer status (Active or Archived), credit-control status (At Risk / Expected / Confirmed), Direct Debit mandate state, unpaid amount, due dates, tags, primary contact email, and customers missing contact info.

The action toolbar. Tick one or more customers and the action bar at the bottom shows the things you can do in bulk: send a Direct Debit mandate request, send a statement, manage tags, pause or unpause reminders and collections, update payment limits, update payment settings, merge customer profiles, delete a customer, and cancel a Direct Debit mandate.

See How to merge duplicate customers and How to archive and reactivate customers for more.

Transactions

Payouts to your bank, the customer payments that make up each payout, and any failed or returned payments. The list shows one row per payout. Click the chevron at the start of a payout row to expand it and see the individual customer payments that make up that payout. Inside the expanded view, clicking a payment's reference opens its payment request drawer.

See Track your payouts in the Transactions dashboard and How long do payments take to settle by payment method.

Create

The Create section is your shortcut to make something new. Three options:

Invoice. Start a new invoice from a PDF upload or from scratch (one-off, recurring, or instalment plan).
Payment. Create a one-off payment request, or generate a reusable payment link to share.
Customer. Add a customer manually, or share a reusable Direct Debit mandate link.

The bottom of the menu

A handful of utilities sit at the bottom of the side menu:

What's New. A feed of recently shipped features and product updates.
Make a referral. Generate a referral link to share with another business. If they sign up, you both get a perk. See Your guide to the ABC Club for how the partner programme works, and ABC Referral Centre for tracking your own referrals.
Settings. Your profile, your team, your integrations, your branding and more.
Get help. Opens a menu with options to start a live chat with us, email support, schedule a call with Customer Success, or open the help guides (you're in them now).

The detail drawer

When you click any row in a list (an invoice, a customer, a payment request, a schedule) a detail drawer slides in from the right with everything Adfin knows about that record. The same drawer pattern is used everywhere. In the drawer you'll typically find:

Details: Information about the records and actions you can take (such as pause)
Activity. The timeline of what's happened so far (see next section).
Customer agent: Configuration of how the payment is being collected, at the invoice or customer level.

The activity log

Every record has an activity log in its drawer: a timeline of what's happened, in plain English. It's the fastest way to answer "why did this happen?". See the screenshot above. If a customer queries something ("I never got the reminder", "why was I charged today?"), the activity log on the relevant record will usually have the answer. You can learn more here

Statuses

Adfin tags every invoice and payment with a status so you can scan a list and see where things stand. At the highest level, statuses group into three buckets:

Expected. Adfin is on track to collect. Nothing for you to do.
Confirmed. The payment has landed. Done.
At risk. Something needs your attention: a failed collection, a cancelled mandate, an overdue invoice.

You can learn more about detailed statuses here

Working with tables

The Payments, Schedules, Customers, and Transactions lists all use the same table pattern. A few things worth knowing:

Show or hide columns

Click the column settings button (top right of the table) to pick which columns are visible. Adfin shows a sensible default set, and you can add more (customer email, last payment date, and so on).

Reorder columns

In the same column settings panel, drag a column to reorder it. The order is saved per device, so the next time you log in the table looks the way you left it.

Filter the list

Above each table you'll find filter controls: by status, date range, customer, and so on. You can combine filters (for example, overdue invoices for a specific customer) and the table updates as you go.

Sort by any column

Click a column header to sort by that column. Click again to flip ascending/descending.

Save a view

Once you've got a table set up the way you like it (the right columns showing, in the right order, with your filters and sort applied) you can save that combination as a view.

Set up the table the way you want it: pick your columns, apply filters, set the sort.
Click the Save icon in the table toolbar.
Give the view a name and pick an icon for it.

Saved views appear as tabs above the table. Click a tab to load that view instantly. Each view captures the filters, sort, column visibility, column order, column widths, and grouping you had at the time of saving.

From the three-dot menu on a view's tab you can:

Set as default. That view loads automatically the next time you open the table.
Edit. Rename the view or change its icon.
Save changes. Update the active view with whatever filters or columns you've changed since opening it.
Delete. Remove the view (you can't delete the default).