Collect required documents before you pay
Published 2026-10-09
Some payments should wait for paperwork. A signed form, a tax document, a proof of insurance, a receipt. You do not want to pay before it is in hand, and you do not want to be the person who forgot to ask. Most of the time the paperwork arrives late, in a different email thread, or not at all, and the payment date creeps up on you.
What a chat cannot do alone
Your assistant can tell you what documents a payment usually needs and can draft the request. What it cannot do is keep the list of who owes what, ask each of them on a schedule, notice when a file arrives, and tell you on payment day which ones are clear. It has no mailbox, no storage, and no clock.
What your assistant builds with Sails
Sails is a coding agent you connect over MCP, with cloud deployment built in. Your assistant writes the code and Sails runs it in the cloud. For this job it builds four pieces.
A table of payments. Each row has who is being paid, the amount, the due date, the document required, and a status of missing, received, or clear.
A file store. When a document arrives, it is saved next to its row, so the proof is attached to the payment it unlocks.
A mailbox. Requests go out from an address you own, and attachments that come back are matched to the right row. Your assistant reads the reply, checks that it is the document you asked for, and marks the row received.
A scheduled job. It is ordinary shell code that runs each weekday morning. It finds payments due within the next week whose document is still missing, and sends a request or a reminder. Before each payment run, it emails you a short note with two lists: who is clear to pay, and who is not and why. The job has no model in it. It filters rows and sends mail.
Why it works
The rule is written down once and applied the same way every time. Nobody has to remember to ask, and nobody can be paid early by accident because the status is right there in the table. The documents are filed where you can find them, which matters most when someone asks for proof months later.
It also keeps the awkward conversation short. The request is the same polite message each time, it goes out on schedule, and you only step in when something is still missing close to the due date.
Hand it off
Copy this into your assistant:
Add Sails from https://sails.app/start. Build me a document check before payment: a table of payments with who is being paid, the amount, the due date, the document required, and a status. Add file storage for the documents and a mailbox for requests and replies. Add a scheduled job that runs each weekday morning, asks for any missing document on payments due within a week, and sends me a note before each payment run showing who is clear and who is not. The job should be plain shell code with no model involved. Start with these payments: [list]. Ask me anything you need before you start.