30 days overdue email — send a statement of account

At a month, stop chasing one invoice and send the whole picture. It is a different question, and it gets a different answer.

30 days overdue
Neutral tone

The email

Subject

Statement of account — [Your business]

Body

Hi [Customer name],

Attached is a statement of everything currently outstanding with us, as at [Date]. The oldest item is invoice [Invoice number] for [Amount], due [Due date] and now thirty days past due.

Rather than chase these one at a time, could you mark each line as one of: approved and scheduled, queried, or not received? If anything on the list never reached you, I will re-send it today.

If it is simpler to talk it through, I am on [Your phone number].

Thanks,
[Your name]
[Your business]

Fill in before you send

[Customer name]
[Date]
[Invoice number]
[Amount]
[Due date]
[Your phone number]
[Your name]
[Your business]

When to send this

At around a month, to a customer with more than one invoice outstanding.
When you suspect some invoices were never received or never matched, and you want to find out which without asking about each one.
When a relationship has drifted into a pattern of partial payments you cannot reconcile.

When not to send this

The wrong reminder at the wrong moment costs more than no reminder at all.

When the customer has exactly one invoice with you.: Instead: A statement with a single line on it is a reminder wearing a costume, and it lets the reader treat a serious escalation as routine admin. Use the firm 30-day email, which asks a question they have to answer.
Before you have reconciled your own ledger.: Instead: Check every line against your bank first. A statement containing one invoice they already paid hands the customer a reason to put the whole list back on you, and it can take weeks to recover from.
As the only thing you send at thirty days, when earlier emails have already been ignored.: Instead: Pair it with a direct question about the oldest invoice, or follow it the same week with the firm version. A statement is information; on its own it asks for nothing and can be filed with a clear conscience.

Notes on this one

The three categories are doing the work. 'Approved and scheduled', 'queried' and 'not received' are the only three states an invoice can be in inside an accounts department, and giving them the vocabulary makes a reply cheap. An open-ended 'please advise on the attached' usually gets no reply at all.

Putting a phone number in an email at thirty days is worth more than it looks. By this point the fastest path to an answer is often a two-minute call, and people who will not write back will frequently pick up.

All 19 reminder templates

Collectly does this across every invoice, on its own

You just picked the email to send on one invoice. Collectly does the same thing continuously for every unpaid invoice you have — reads the replies, works out why each one is unpaid, estimates when it will land, and drafts the follow-up for you to approve.

With 15 rules it cannot talk its way around

A paid or written-off invoice is never chased again. Follow-ups are switched off permanently, not deferred.
A disputed invoice stops automated chasing entirely and goes to a person to resolve.
A promise to pay on a date pauses reminders until that date has passed. Collectly checks back the day after, not on the day.
At least three days between reminders on the same invoice, so re-running the analysis cannot turn into nagging. A resent or corrected invoice the customer has just asked for is not a reminder, and still waits for your approval.

Try it on your invoices See how it works

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