Invoice payment reminders
Learn how to automatically send payment reminders to customers before the invoice due dates and early discount dates.
Overview
Monite can automatically send payment reminder emails to an entity’s customers before the invoice due dates and early discount dates. Entities can customize the contents of payment reminders and the days on which these reminders should be sent. For example, an entity can send payment reminders to remind a counterpart about the early discount days defined in the invoice’s payment terms.
There are two types of payment reminders: discount reminders and final reminders. Discount reminders are configured to be sent before each early payment discount date defined in the payment terms. Conversely, a final reminder is the last reminder to a counterpart and is sent just before the invoice’s due date as defined by the term_final
field in the payment terms.
Reminders can be configured on a per-invoice basis or shared between multiple invoices. The language on the payment reminder email depends on the language of the invoice’s counterpart. If the counterpart language is null
, all payment reminder emails to the counterpart will be in English. For more information, see Email template localization.
How it works
A payment reminder is sent if the following conditions are met:
- the counterpart has not paid the invoice in full yet,
- the invoice has
payment_reminder_id
specified (see below), - the invoice is due in N days, or an early payment discount ends in M days (where M and N are customizable),
- entity setting
reminder.enabled
istrue
, - counterpart setting
reminders_enabled
istrue
.
Payment reminders are sent to the email address of the counterpart’s default contact, which gets saved in the counterpart_contact.email
field of the invoice. The From
address in reminders is "Monite" <noreply@monite.com>
, and it can be customized.
Configure payment reminders
Invoice payment reminders are directly linked to payment terms. When configuring payment reminders, you must consider certain information about the invoice’s payment terms. This includes the number of discount tiers and the assigned due dates of all payment tiers. For example, suppose you assign a payment reminder with two early discount tiers to an invoice whose payment term has a single early discount tier. In that case, the system will only notify the counterpart about the early discount date defined on the the payment term.
If an invoice has no early discount dates in the payment terms, no discount reminders will be triggered at any point. However, since all invoices must have due dates, final reminders can be configured to be sent any number of days before the invoice’s due date defined in the term_final
field on payment terms.
To use payment reminders, you need to create a reminder configuration and include it when creating an invoice. The value of a payment reminder’s days_before
field represents the number of days before the specified payment term’s number_of_days
field that a reminder notification is triggered. For reminders to be triggered successfully, the days_before
field on each payment reminder tier must be less than the number_of_days
field in the payment terms for its corresponding tier.
Invoices cannot be issued when the potential due dates on any of the payment term’s tiers occur before the scheduled payment reminder date for the corresponding tier. Attempting to issue an invoice where the value of the payment reminder’s days_before
field on any tier exceeds the value of the payment term’s number_of_days
field will throw an error.
1. Create a payment reminder configuration
To create a new payment reminder, call POST /payment_reminders
. The days_before
value represents the number of days before each payment due date—early discount or final—to send the reminder notifications to the counterpart:
The email subject and body can include variables such as {invoice_number}
which will be substituted with the corresponding values.
To use the /payment_reminders*
endpoints with an entity user token, this entity user must have a role that includes the payment_reminder
permission.
The response contains the ID assigned to this configuration. You will need to specify this ID later when creating invoices.
2. Specify the payment reminder configuration for an invoice
When creating a new invoice or updating an existing draft invoice, you can use the payment_reminder_id
field to specify the desired payment reminder configuration for this invoice:
After configuring a payment reminder and assigning it to an invoice, you can ensure that the payment reminder’s configuration aligns with the invoice’s payment terms configuration before issuing the invoice. To do this, make a POST
request to the /receivables/{receivable_id}/verify
endpoint.
Monite allows entities to update a payment reminder’s configuration when assigned to an invoice. However, the configuration on the assigned invoice is frozen whenever the invoice is issued, and any changes to the payment reminder configuration will not affect the invoice’s reminders. For more information on updating payment reminders, see PATCH /payment_reminders/{payment_reminder_id}
.
The payment_reminders
field on the warnings
object of the response informs the user about any incorrect payment reminder configurations on the invoice as shown:
Preview a payment reminder email
After creating a payment reminder and assigning it to an invoice, you can preview reminder emails before sending them out. This step can be helpful when troubleshooting email template layouts for a payment reminder to ensure the final presentation aligns with your template design.
To preview a payment reminder template, call POST /receivables/{receivable_id}/preview
:
The type
field determines the type of receivable document to be previewed and is a required field for previewing payment reminders. The value of the type
field depends on the type of payment reminder email. This can be either discount_reminder
or final_reminder
.
The values of the subject_text
and body_text
fields will replace the subject_text
and body_text
variables defined when creating your custom templates. For more information, see Create and manage email templates.
Manually trigger payment reminders
After configuring a payment reminder and assigning it to an invoice, you can manually trigger it to send a reminder email to a counterpart. Monite allows you to send test reminders to an invoice’s counterpart, allowing you to verify the accuracy of your configuration. You can also use the recipients
field in the request object to include email addresses that you intend to send the reminder as a copy or blind copy.
To manually trigger a reminder, call POST /receivables/{receivable_id}/send_test_reminder
and provide the reminder_type
in the request body as shown:
You can manually trigger the reminder email on any payment reminder tier by using a reminder_type
value of term_1
, term_2
or term_final
in the request object. The successful response sends the reminder email to the counterpart and returns the mail_ids
in the response.
Enable or disable payment reminders
For specific counterparts
By default, payment reminders are enabled for all counterparts of an entity.
If you want to disable reminders for a specific counterpart, such as a customer who always pays on time, call PATCH /counterparts/{counterpart_id}
and set the reminders_enabled
field to false
:
This disables not only payment reminders, but also overdue reminders for this counterpart.
For all counterparts
To disable reminders for all counterparts of a specific entity, call PATCH /entities/{entity_id}/settings
and change the reminder.enabled
field to false
.
A successful request disables both overdue reminders and payment reminders for all counterparts of an entity.
To enable reminders again, change the reminder.enabled
field back to true
.