The scenario
A three-person kitchen renovation business in Newcastle. Jobs are quoted at three to twelve thousand dollars, plus the odd deposit taken upfront. The work is good and repeat customers keep coming, but cash flow is always tight in the last week of the month.
Here is what happens to an invoice. The boss finishes a job on a Friday, texts the office manager a photo of the finished kitchen, and the invoice is raised "next week". It goes out eight days after the job ended, dated that day. The due date says fourteen days, because that is what the template says. The customer pays when they get to it. At day thirty the office manager scrolls back through the inbox looking for unpaid ones, sends three emails in one afternoon, and gets paid for some.
The frustrating part is not the customer. It is that the chase depends on someone remembering to start it, and the remembering only happens when the bank balance looks thin. So the chasing happens late, in bursts, and in a tone that is either too apologetic or too sharp, depending on who is doing it and how the week has gone.
This post is about turning that into a sequence that runs by itself, and the parts of it you have to fix before any reminder will work.
Why reminder emails alone do not fix this
People reach for a reminder tool first. A reminder tells someone politely that money is owed. If the invoice went out late, if the terms were never discussed, if the bank details are in a PDF attachment that nobody opened, then a polite reminder arrives into a mess and does very little.
There is an order of work. Most of the improvement comes from the first three items below, and none of them are software.
Step one: invoice the day the job finishes
A reminder can only start when there is an invoice to remind about. Every day between finishing the job and sending the invoice is a day the customer's motivation cools, and a day added to when you get paid.
Write the invoice the same afternoon, or the same morning if the job finished late. It does not need to be perfect. It needs the job description, the amount, the payment details and a due date. If pricing is awkward to put together on the day, simplify the invoice line items until it takes ten minutes rather than an hour.
If the invoice cannot go out until Friday because the paperwork piles up, then Friday morning is an invoice block. Same time every week. Nothing else booked.
Step two: agree terms before the job, not on the invoice
The due date on an invoice is a request, not an agreement. Get terms said out loud, before the job starts, and write them into the quote and the booking confirmation.
That is a sentence, not a policy document, for example: payment within seven days of the invoice, deposit of twenty five per cent to hold the start date, bank transfer only. Say it on the phone when the quote is accepted, and repeat it in the confirmation email. The invoice then arrives as a reminder of something already agreed, which is a completely different email from a demand from a stranger.
If you have always offered fourteen days, consider whether fourteen days is a decision or an accident. For a small renovation, seven days is normal in plenty of trades. Pick what you actually want and put it everywhere: quote, invoice, website, the email signature.
Step three: make paying trivially easy
Count the steps a customer has to take to pay one of your invoices. Open a PDF. Find bank details that may be in a scanned image. Sign into their bank. Type the BSB and account number by hand, and get a digit wrong. Type a reference number they have to invent.
Each of those is a place where payment waits for the next quiet moment, which may be next week. On a pay by transfer invoice, include the payment details in the body of the email, in plain text, not only in the attachment. Put a payment reference in the same email, ideally something short and copyable.
If your bank or accounting tool offers a pay-now link, or a card and pay-by-bank option, use it. A customer who can tap one button in the email pays that day. A customer who has to log into banking pay later.
Step four: write the sequence once, then leave it alone
Now the reminders earn their keep. A chase sequence is a small fixed list of messages, each with a clear day attached to it.
A sequence that works for most small trade businesses, counted from the invoice date:
- Day zero. The invoice email itself, sent with the payment details inline and a due date stated plainly.
- Day three. A short, friendly note: just checking the invoice arrived, here is the link, happy to answer any questions.
- On the due date, if unpaid, a note that the invoice is due today, with the link again.
- Day three after due. A slightly plainer note, asking whether there is a problem with the invoice and offering to call.
- Day seven after due. A phone call, not an email. Late and overdue is a conversation.
- Day fourteen after due. A firm letter stating the next step: late fee, suspension of future work, or whatever your terms actually say.
Write each message once, in your own voice, and store them as templates. The content should be dull and specific: what is owed, which job, how to pay, what happens next. No apology, no long preamble, no asking whether they have had a chance to look at it.
Two rules for the sequence. First, it stops automatically when the invoice is marked paid, which means someone has to reconcile payments at least weekly. Second, the tone escalates but the facts never change. A reminder that says different amounts or different terms in different messages will be treated as unreliable.
Step five: build the trigger and the stop
The reminder sequence needs two conditions: an unpaid invoice at a given age, and no payment recorded. Both live in your accounting software, which usually already knows the invoice date and the amount outstanding.
Most accounting packages can send statements or reminder emails natively. Turn that on first, because it is free and it already has the data. If the native version is too rigid, the alternative is a small scheduled job: pull unpaid invoices older than a set number of days, match them against the reminder stage, send the right template, and record that it went out.
Whichever route you take, the tracking matters more than the sending. Keep a single field on each invoice that says which stage it is at, so nobody sends the same reminder twice. A customer who gets the day-three note twice is annoyed. A customer who gets the day-three note after the phone call is confused.
Step six: watch it for a month
Do not judge the sequence in week one. Give it four weeks of running, and look at three things:
- How many days between job completion and invoice. This is the number that moves first.
- How many invoices are paid before the first reminder. This should grow as the terms and the pay link start working.
- How many need the phone call. Fewer is better, but the call is not a failure. It is the part you keep.
None of this requires new software if your accounting package already does reminders. The effort goes into the terms being agreed and the invoice going out on the day, which is unglamorous work that nothing else can do for you.
The failure modes
The sequence starts but never stops. Money lands, the invoice is marked paid late, and the customer gets a stern reminder for something they already paid. Nothing destroys trust faster. Reconcile at least weekly, and give yourself a manual override to pause a sequence.
Reminders go out from a no-reply address. Replies bouncing off a no-reply address turns a small query into a week of delay. Send from a real mailbox and read what comes back.
The template is too polite to be useful. A reminder that reads "just a gentle nudge, no rush at all" teaches the customer that the due date is decorative. Be friendly, but do not signal flexibility you do not mean.
Two people chase the same invoice. Without a shared record of what has been sent, the boss calls and the office manager emails on the same afternoon. One place, one record.
Terms said on the phone but never written down. The customer remembers "soon". Put it in the quote and confirmation, and the invoice becomes evidence rather than opinion.
Automating a process that is broken. If the invoice is routinely late because pricing is done from memory, a reminder sequence just starts later. Fix the invoice timing first.
Reminders sent to the wrong address. Invoices often go to a bookkeeper, a partner, or a site office. Check the contact on file for each customer rather than trusting the address the enquiry came from.
What good looks like after a month
The invoice is issued within a day of the job finishing, and the customer has already been told the terms twice. The reminder sequence is running, mostly unnoticed. You see it only as a weekly list of which invoices are unpaid and what stage they are at.
In practice, the visible work drops from an afternoon of scrolling and drafting to about fifteen minutes of reconciling. A handful of customers still need a phone call, and that is the right outcome: the phone call is where you end up with a conversation about their next job, a request for a referral, and a customer who pays on time next time.
The cash flow effect is quieter than people expect but real. Money that used to arrive around day twenty eight arrives around day ten, because the invoice went out earlier and the payment link was there. That is not a bigger business, it is the same business with a shorter gap between finishing work and being paid for it.
Do this week
Pick your worst five late invoices. For each one, note the date the job finished, the date the invoice went out, the due date, and the date it was paid. It will take twenty minutes, and it will show you which of these steps is your actual bottleneck. Most businesses find the problem is the first two, not the reminders.