Two weeks overdue invoice email — reach the person who pays

Two weeks of silence usually means you are emailing someone who cannot pay you. This email's only job is to get you the person who can.

Two weeks overdue
Neutral tone

The email

Subject

Invoice [Invoice number] — who should I be speaking to?

Body

Hi [Customer name],

Invoice [Invoice number] for [Amount] is now fourteen days past its due date of [Due date]. I have sent two reminders and have not had a reply to either.

I am not assuming anything is wrong — it may simply be that this is not your area. If someone else handles supplier payments, could you forward this to them or send me their address? I will take it from there and stop filling your inbox.

If it is your area and something is holding the invoice up, tell me what it is and I will deal with it.

Thanks,
[Your name]
[Your business]

Fill in before you send

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

When to send this

Two weeks past due, after two unanswered reminders to the same person.
When your contact is the person who hired you rather than the person who pays suppliers — very common in agencies and professional services.
When you have no direct line into accounts payable and need one before the amount gets old.

When not to send this

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

When your contact has been replying to you all along.: Instead: Asking to be passed to someone else when the person is engaged reads as going over their head, and it can turn a helpful contact into an obstacle. Keep working with them and ask them directly what the blocker is.
By copying in your contact's boss or the company's general inbox to apply pressure.: Instead: Ask your contact for the right address first, in this email. Escalating over someone's head at two weeks is a card you can only play once, and it is worth much more at sixty days than it is now.
When the two earlier reminders went to an address that bounced or to a person who has left.: Instead: Fix the address before you send anything. Counting reminders that never arrived makes your record wrong, and the first person who checks will discount everything else you have said.

Notes on this one

The most common cause of a two-week-old invoice in a small business is not a customer deciding not to pay. It is an invoice sitting with a project manager who has no ability to pay it and no habit of forwarding it. Nothing in your escalation ladder helps with that; a different recipient does.

Offering to stop emailing the person you are writing to is not a throwaway line. It gives them a concrete reason to spend thirty seconds forwarding your email, which is all you are actually asking for.

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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