Day One, Day Seven, Day Fourteen

An internet provider in Kisumu bills 300 businesses on the first of every month. Most pay within a week. Around forty do not, and each month the same accounts clerk works through the same list by hand: an email on day three, a phone call when she gets to it, a disconnection threat that is sometimes sent and sometimes forgotten. Nobody can say afterwards which customer heard what, or when.

A ladder, not a reminder

A plain reminder says the same thing every time it runs. A dunning ladder says something different at each stage of overdue: friendly at first, firmer after a week, final after two, and then it stops talking to the customer and tells your own team instead. That escalation is what makes chasing work, and it is the part a busy clerk drops first.

The ladder lives under Settings → Sales & POS → Dunning Ladder. It starts with four stages you can change:

Up to eight stages, each at its own day overdue, each with its own subject and message. Messages fill themselves in with the customer’s name, the invoice number, the amount, the due date, how many days it is overdue and your business name — and can carry a payment link that opens a page where the customer can pay there and then, by M-Pesa or card.

The rules that stop it nagging

• Once per stage, per channel, ever. Every attempt is recorded — sent, failed or skipped — so a stage that went out yesterday never goes out again.
• Never two stages on one day. An invoice that heard from one stage this morning waits for tomorrow.
• The latest stage due wins. An invoice already twenty days overdue when you switch the ladder on gets the final notice, not a friendly day-one note after it. The stages it jumped are recorded as skipped.
• It stops the moment the invoice is paid, because only invoices with a balance are read.

A channel that cannot be used is recorded with the reason rather than quietly dropped: no phone number on the customer, SMS not set up under Connectors, the plan’s daily email allowance used up. Every invoice shows its dunning history — stage, channel, date and outcome. That history is the answer when a customer says nobody told them.

Pausing the customer you are already talking to

At the Kisumu provider, a hotel disputes two months of charges after an outage, and a school has agreed to clear its balance in three instalments. Neither should receive a final notice while those conversations are going on. On each customer’s page, the Collections panel pauses dunning for that customer; resume it later and each invoice gets the stage due now, not the ones it missed while paused.

The ladder chases. A person decides. The last rung is a message to your own team, not to the customer.

Charging the card before chasing anyone

Most of the forty late payers in Kisumu are not refusing to pay. They are on a monthly retainer and simply did not get round to it. For them the better answer is not a reminder at all. A recurring invoice schedule can now be set to charge the saved card or send an M-Pesa prompt the day each invoice is raised.

1. Save the card once

   A card is saved when the customer pays a recurring invoice by card through Paystack, or ticks “save this card” in the customer portal, and Paystack confirms it can be charged again.

2. Turn on Issue automatically

   Auto-charge needs the schedule to issue its invoices without review. A draft is not final, so a draft is never charged.

3. Choose how to collect

   Charge the saved card, in KES; or send an M-Pesa prompt, which the customer approves on their phone — a request, not a debit.

4. Let it retry

   Up to three attempts, one a day. The schedule’s owner is told after the first failure and again if it gives up — and only then does the invoice move onto the dunning ladder.

The ladder leaves an invoice alone while its charge is still being tried, so a customer is never chased for an invoice their card is about to pay. More in the Dunning Ladder guide and on the dunning feature page.

Frequently asked questions