Getting paid has never been easier. We all know that sometimes it’s a pain to track down payments from clients so Táve has made it a piece of cake by automating it!
Invoice Reminder Email Template
Before we look at how the automation works, let’s look at the emails that we’re going to send to client. You'll find this here in Settings › Email Templates, the template called Your next invoice is due soon. You can amend the wording to suit, here's what it might look like:
Hi {{recipient.first_name}},
This is just a friendly message to let you know that you have an invoice for {{invoice.balance}} due on {{invoice.due_date}} ({{invoice.due_period}}).
You can {{item.link_start}}pay this invoice online{{item.link_end}} at your convenience using our secure booking website.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Best,
{{brand.email_signature}}
Notice, that we’re using a few important tokens in the email: {{invoice.balance}}, {{invoice.due_date}}, {{invoice.due_period}}, {{item.link_start}} and {{item.link_end}}.
You don't have to include all of these invoice tokens but they are helpful so your client knows all the details. However, you MUST include {{item.link_start}} and {{item.link_end}} tokens in order to include the direct link for them to pay their invoice.
Automating Invoice Reminders
Now that we have our Your next invoice is due soon email template set up, let’s look at automating it.
Your account will come with three automations installed for sending invoice reminders. They are disabled by default but you can enable them easily. You'll find those here in Settings › Automations:
You'll see a 1st, 2nd and 3rd reminder automation in your account. What these invoice reminders do is look in your account for any invoices with a balance due and look at the due dates of those invoices. The automations then run according to the Executes box you've set up on each.
The 1st, 2nd and 3rd reminders don't correspond to any particular invoices, instead they would apply to all invoices on an order. The 1st reminder would be an initial reminder and you might want to set this to execute 7 days before the invoice is due. The 2nd reminder would be a follow up reminder that might execute 2 days before the invoice is due (if it hasn't been paid yet). The 3rd reminder could be an overdue reminder that executes 3 days after the invoice is due (again if it hasn't been paid yet).
This chain of reminders would run for every invoice in your account where there is a balance outstanding and a due date set. Without enabling these automations you'd have to manually follow up all your invoices so it's best to enable these and let Táve take care of that for you!
If an invoice is fully paid and there isn't a balance due, the invoice reminders won't send anything out to your client, so the chain of reminders only continues to send out if an invoice hasn't been paid yet.
Here's an example of an invoice reminder automation. This is the 1st reminder, which would run 7 days before the invoice's due date:
This automation contains a condition so it will not run if the client has selected an offline payment method. Selecting an offline payment method requires the client to fill in when you should expect the payment and a message. This will mark the invoice as 'promised' and the condition here ensures that the invoice reminder won't run for anyone who has already sent a payment promise.
Let’s look closer at the Action that the automation is taking.
We see that the recipient of the email is “Determined by observed item”. Since, in our main automation, we are observing “Invoice > Balance due”, the recipient determined will be whomever is attached to the specific invoice (i.e. this will automatically send the email to the person assigned as the recipient of the invoice).
Next, we simply set the email to use the template “Your invoice is due soon”. That’s the one that we set up earlier.
Since that email is pretty generic, you could use it for all three reminder emails. However, you might want to create another version of the email template for your 3rd overdue invoice reminder. It's up to you!
Now just let automations do the work and you’ll be collecting payment in no time!
If you've deleted the invoice reminder automations that came pre-installed in your account, don't worry! You can re-install them from the Template Gallery here: