Automatic payment reminders
Sales Scribe can chase overdue sales invoices for you. When automatic payment reminders are switched on, customers with an unpaid invoice past its due date receive up to three escalating reminder emails — so late payers are followed up consistently without anyone having to remember.
Reminders are off by default. Nothing is sent until you switch them on.
How the reminders work
Once an issued invoice goes past its due date and still has an outstanding balance, reminders are sent on this schedule:
| When | Tone |
|---|---|
| 7 days overdue | A friendly nudge — "just a reminder, please disregard if you've already paid" |
| 14 days overdue | A firm second reminder asking for payment at the earliest convenience |
| 30 days overdue | A final notice, mentioning that further steps may follow if the balance is not settled |
Every reminder:
- carries your organisation's branding (logo and colours), like all customer emails;
- attaches the invoice PDF, so the customer never has to search for it;
- attaches an outstanding statement: every invoice the customer still owes, as at the day of the reminder, each with its own date, number and amount (see Send a customer statement);
- includes the view online link (and the pay link, where online payment is enabled);
- shows the amount outstanding and how many days overdue the invoice is;
- goes to the contact holding the Invoice recipient communication role — falling back to the primary contact, then the customer's account email.
Invoices brought across from your old system
If you moved your books to Sales Scribe, the invoices still outstanding at that point are reminded about like any other. Your old system issued them, so Sales Scribe holds no copy to attach. Their reminder attaches the outstanding statement only and says so. The email still names the invoice's own number, its date and the amount outstanding, and it has no view-online or pay link.
When reminders stop
Reminders stop automatically as soon as the invoice no longer needs chasing — when it is paid, credited in full, voided, or written off. Each invoice receives each reminder at most once.
If you switch reminders on while some invoices are already long overdue, the customer receives only the single reminder currently due — an invoice already 40 days overdue gets one final notice, never a backlog of three emails at once.
Switch reminders on or off
- Go to Settings → Payment reminders. (You need permission to manage organisation settings — an Owner or Administrator role.)
- Turn Send automatic payment reminders on or off.
- Select Save.
The change is recorded in the audit history.
Exclude a particular customer
For accounts you chase personally — a key customer with agreed extended terms, for example — you can exempt just that customer:
- Open Customers, edit the customer.
- Tick Exclude from payment reminders.
- Save.
The rest of your customers continue to be reminded as normal. Customers without an email address on file are skipped automatically.
Seeing what was sent
Each reminder appears in the invoice's email history on the invoice page, like any other email, and the audit history records every reminder queued.
Things to know
- Reminders apply to sales invoices only — not quotes, proformas (which expire instead), or purchase documents.
- The reminder schedule (7 / 14 / 30 days) is fixed in this release.
- Draft invoices are never reminded about; only issued invoices with an outstanding balance count.