The Follow-Up Sequence: When to Chase an Invoice, Day 1 to Day 90
You invoiced a distributor ₦1,200,000 on Net 30. It is now day 52, and you have sent two emails, both on days you happened to remember. That is the real problem. Businesses that get paid on time are not luckier or better liked, they just run the same follow-up schedule on every invoice instead of chasing only when cash gets tight.
Here is a calendar you can copy. What matters is not the wording of each message (there are templates for that in invoice reminder emails that get you paid) but the timing, the channel, and who sends it.
Day 0 to the due date
Invoice on the day the work is delivered, not at the end of the month. Every day you sit on it is a day added to the front of your payment cycle. Send it to the person who actually pays, not just the person who hired you, with the due date written as a real date and a payment link in the body.
Seven days before the due date, send a short heads-up. This is the highest-value message in the sequence and the one almost nobody sends. You are not chasing, you are confirming: does the invoice look right, is it approved, is it in the next payment run? If something is wrong, a missing PO number, the wrong billing address, a line nobody signed off, you find out now instead of on day 40.
On the due date, send a one-line nudge on the same thread with the payment link. Both of these go out from your billing address, automated, friendly, no drama. Save your personal name for later in the sequence, when it will carry more weight.
Day 3 and day 7: still an accident
On day 3, reply on the existing email thread in the same tone as before. Assume the invoice is sitting in someone's approval queue, because it usually is.
On day 7, pick up the phone. This is the first real shift in the sequence, and it is a change of channel, not a change of temperature. Email is easy to park, a call is not. Ask the accounts payable contact one specific question: what date will this be paid? Do not ask for payment, ask for a date, then email to confirm the date they gave you. Now you are holding a commitment rather than a hope.
Day 14 and day 30: escalate the person, not the volume
Most businesses escalate by sending more emails to the same person. That does nothing except train them to ignore you. You escalate by changing who is on the message.
On day 14, whoever owns the relationship emails the person who signed off on the work, and attaches a statement of account showing every open invoice, not only this one. Keep it factual. The buyer usually has more internal pull than accounts payable does, and they do not enjoy being the reason a supplier is unpaid.
On day 30, you email their counterpart yourself, and you make a commercial decision out loud: work pauses, or the account goes on credit hold, until the balance clears. A month overdue with no payment date is no longer an admin problem, it is a question of whether this customer is worth carrying. Your aging report will tell you how much of your cash is stuck in that bucket across every customer, which is usually the number that stiffens your spine.
Day 60 and day 90: it stops being a reminder
At day 60, the tone changes for good and stays changed. Send a formal demand, written, dated, signed by you, sent by email and delivered on paper. It contains:
- The invoice number, the amount, and the original due date.
- The number of days overdue, stated plainly.
- A dated list of every attempt you made to collect and every promise they made.
- A hard deadline, 14 days is normal, and exactly what happens when it passes.
No apologies, no "just circling back", no softening. You are creating a record, and the fact that you are creating a record is itself the message.
Day 90 is a decision point, not another reminder. You either hand the debt to a collections agent or a lawyer, or you write it off and close the account. Money that is 90 days overdue is far less likely to be recovered than money that is 30 days overdue, and every extra week of hoping costs you. The point of the whole calendar above is that you should almost never arrive here by surprise.
Making the calendar run itself
None of this is difficult on a single invoice. It fails because it depends on someone remembering, in a busy week, across forty open invoices, which one is on day 7 and which one is on day 30. That is the part Arvalox handles: it holds the schedule for every invoice, sends the pre-due and overdue reminders in your voice, and surfaces the accounts that have crossed into the stage where a human needs to pick up the phone.