The Reminder That Treats Everyone the Same
Arrears chasing works because it escalates — a nudge, then a letter, then a call, then something formal. The plain automated reminder sends the nudge, on one organization-wide cadence, to everybody. The dunning ladder sends a different message at each stage of overdue, by email, SMS or WhatsApp. What each is good for, and the rungs that are still yours.
Every agency knows the arrears ladder even if nobody has written it down. Three days late is an oversight and gets a text. Two weeks is a pattern and gets a phone call. Six weeks is a problem and gets a letter with a date in it. Three months is a decision, and somebody senior makes it.
The ladder works because each rung means something. A tenant who receives the six-week letter knows they have passed the point where a text would have done, and that knowledge is most of what makes them pay.
Automated reminders are frequently sold as replacing that ladder. A single reminder on a single cadence does not. A staged ladder replaces its lower rungs — and understanding exactly where the automation stops is the difference between useful chasing and a stream of messages everybody has learned to ignore. AWRA now ships both, and this piece is about choosing between them.
What the plain reminder does
This is what runs when the dunning ladder is off. It is a narrow mechanism and worth describing exactly, because the narrowness is the whole of the analysis.
-
A job runs every morning
It looks for invoices with a balance still outstanding, not paid, not cancelled, and past their due date.
-
It checks whether reminders are switched on
A setting per organization, so this is opt-in rather than something that starts happening to your tenants without a decision.
-
It checks whether the cadence is due
Daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom number of days. If the last run was inside that interval, today does nothing.
-
It emails every customer with an overdue invoice
One pass, everyone who qualifies. A customer with no email address on record is passed over.
-
It stamps the cadence only if something went out
A day with no overdue invoices does not consume the interval, so a quiet week does not delay the first real reminder.
That last detail is a small piece of care worth noticing: without it, a fortnightly cadence could burn its interval on a day when there was nothing to send, and the first genuine reminder would arrive two weeks later than intended.
The plain reminder’s cadence belongs to your organization, not to the debt. One interval governs every tenant, whether they are three days late or three months.
The single cadence, and what it means
The interval is set once per organization for this kind of notification. It is not set per invoice, per customer, or per how far overdue the debt is.
So a weekly cadence means: once a week, everybody with anything overdue receives a reminder. The tenant who was three days late and has since paid receives nothing, correctly. The tenant three days late today and the one ninety days late both receive the same message, on the same morning, with the same tone.
One rung, repeated.
What one repeated rung is genuinely good at
It removes the excuse. The single largest category of late payment in residential property is not inability or unwillingness — it is that the tenant forgot, and nothing reminded them until somebody had time to make a call. An automatic weekly nudge eliminates that entire category without consuming any of your staff time, and for most portfolios that is the bulk of the arrears by count, if not by value.
What it is not good at is everything above that first rung. A tenant ninety days down is not going to be moved by the same email they ignored twelve times, and continuing to send it is worse than sending nothing, because it teaches them that your process has no next step. That is what the ladder is for.
The dunning ladder
Switch the ladder on in settings and it replaces the single cadence for your organization. Each stage fires at a number of days overdue, on the channels you choose for it, with its own editable wording — and placeholders for the tenant’s name, the invoice, the amount, the due date, the days overdue and a link to pay.
-
Each stage fires once per invoice
A stage reaches each of its channels once, ever, so the day-seven notice is sent on day seven and not again on day eight. An invoice never hears from two stages on the same day.
-
It reaches tenants without an email
SMS goes through your organization’s own SMS provider and WhatsApp through its own approved template, so a tenant with only a phone number on record still hears from you.
-
It stops when the invoice is paid
Only invoices with a balance are read, so payment ends the sequence with nobody having to remember to stop it.
-
It pauses per customer
A tenant on an agreed payment plan can be paused on their record, and unpaused when the plan ends — rather than switched off and forgotten.
-
It leaves a history on the invoice
Every attempt is recorded against the invoice — sent, failed or skipped, with the stage, the channel and the recipient — so whoever picks the debt up next can see exactly what the tenant has already been told.
Switching the ladder on part-way through a portfolio does not bombard anyone. An invoice already twenty days overdue gets the stage it has reached, not the friendly day-one note followed by every stage after it; the stages it jumped are recorded as skipped.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- A daily job that finds invoices with a balance outstanding, unpaid, uncancelled and past due.
- A plain reminder on a cadence you set — daily, weekly, monthly or a custom number of days — opt-in per organization.
- A dunning ladder, off until you switch it on: stages keyed on days overdue, each with its own email, SMS or WhatsApp wording, firing once per invoice and stopping when it is paid.
- An escalation stage to your own team, so an invoice that outlives the final notice lands in your staff’s bell and inbox rather than receiving another message.
- A per-customer pause for tenants on an agreed payment plan.
- A chasing history on each invoice — every stage and channel, sent, failed or skipped.
More we can add to your workspace
- A legal-notice or debt-collector hand-off — the invoice, its history and the tenant’s details passed to your advocate or collection agency as a stage of the ladder.
- Automatic interest on overdue balances, at a rate and from a day your agreement sets.
- A pause that ends itself on the date a payment plan finishes, rather than one somebody has to lift.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We will not send reminders by default. Automated contact with your tenants is a decision an agency makes deliberately, and a system that starts messaging debtors because a setting shipped enabled would be making that decision for you.
- We will not write threatening copy on your behalf. The ladder ships with plain wording you can edit; what a demand says, and at what point it says it, carries legal weight in a tenancy — that is your letter and your judgement.
A hand-off stage to your advocate or collector, automatic interest and a self-ending pause are scope rather than ceilings. The ladder, the per-invoice history, the pause flag and the SMS and WhatsApp channels all exist and work.
SMS and WhatsApp send through your organization’s own provider accounts, so the messages are billed to you by that provider and come from your sender name. Check both are configured before you put either channel on a stage — a stage with no working channel records a skip, not a send.
Anything above that you need, we can build for you
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do for your organisation. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are both in the product because clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself, and the same door is open for whatever you just read about. One qualification so this is worth what it claims: a small number of things on this blog we deliberately leave to a specialist rather than build — a statutory ledger we will not sign our name to, a rule that would decide a tax question for you, a clinical or member-funds record that belongs in a regulated system — and where that is true the post says so in those words. Everything else is a scope, a timeline and a price.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
The module-shaped additions, which are the ones readers ask for most often
A price list with real discount authority, a customer-facing quotation that expires, a bill of materials or recipe costing, a staff advance that is issued, acquitted and chased, a member or unit ledger, a matching rule that holds a payment. Each of these is a build rather than a setting, and each has been quoted before — a bigger piece of work than a custom field, with a written spec and a date instead of a roadmap slide.
The report, document or pack nothing currently produces
The board pack in the shape your board actually asks for, a donor or funder layout, an invoice or receipt template carrying what your regulator or your customer expects, a dataset the report builder cannot reach yet. Usually the fastest thing on this list to deliver, because the data is already in the system.
Systems, rails and hardware you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store, core banking or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed. Plus the physical edge: a scanner, a scale, a weighbridge or a till peripheral feeding the door it belongs to.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. Nothing here waits on a regulator or a published specification, which is why operational builds are the ones we quote fastest. Tell us the requirement that would otherwise rule us out — that is a better first conversation than a demo.
Tell us what your operation needsSetting the ladder up
The practical approach is to let the automation own the lower rungs completely and to run the top of the ladder deliberately, because the top is where judgement lives anyway. The ladder ships with four stages you can rename, retime and reword:
| Days overdue | Stage | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Friendly reminder, by email and SMS | The system, with no staff time |
| 7 | Firm reminder, by email, SMS and WhatsApp | The system, in different words |
| 14 | Final notice, by email, SMS and WhatsApp | The system, and it should say something different again |
| 30 | Escalation to your own team | You — a call from a named person, then a decision taken by somebody senior and recorded |
Keep the stages few and the gaps real. Three messages a week apart, each saying something the last did not, is a ladder. Seven messages a few days apart is a barrage, and tenants filter a barrage — which costs you every rung, for the tenants who would have responded as well as for the ones who would not.
Running the rungs the system does not
- Configure your SMS provider and WhatsApp template before you add those channels to a stage, and send yourself a test.
- Read the wording of each stage aloud. The final notice should say something the friendly reminder did not, or it is the same rung repeated.
- Work the escalated invoices first, from the aged receivables report on a fixed day each week. That band is where a call still changes the outcome.
- Read the invoice’s chasing history before calling, so you do not open with a reminder the tenant received yesterday.
- Pause tenants on an agreed payment plan on their record, and note the date the plan ends somewhere you will see it — the pause stays on until somebody lifts it.
- Review anything past sixty days as a portfolio rather than one at a time. Patterns by building, by unit type or by move-in cohort are visible in aggregate and invisible one tenant at a time.
Why the first rungs are worth automating at all
It would be reasonable to ask whether automated reminders earn their place. They do, and the argument is about consistency rather than about the message.
A manual first rung is applied when somebody has time. In practice that means it is applied in the first week of the month and not in the third, applied to tenants whose names are familiar and not to the ones nobody has met, and stops entirely whenever the person who does it is on leave. Arrears then grow in the gaps, and the gaps are invisible because nobody is tracking the reminders that were not sent.
An automated rung is applied identically to everybody, whoever is on leave. That is a materially different property from being applied well, and for a first reminder it is the more valuable of the two.
The collection mechanics are in rent and service-charge collection, the trust-money discipline in deposits and landlord funds, and the reporting that keeps the mandate in owner statements and payouts.
Our take
If you only want the first rung, the plain reminder on a weekly cadence does it — it removes the tenants who simply forgot without spending staff time. If you want a ladder, switch the dunning ladder on: three stages by email, SMS and WhatsApp that each say something different, then an escalation to your own team at thirty days. Keep the top rungs human — the call, the letter with a date in it, the decision — and pause tenants on a payment plan rather than letting the ladder chase an agreement you have already made.
See arrears chasing that escalates
A dunning ladder by days overdue, on email, SMS and WhatsApp, firing once per invoice, stopping when paid, with a chasing history on every invoice and an aged receivables view for the rungs a person still has to work.
Explore receivablesFrequently asked questions
How often are reminders sent?
It depends on which mode you use. The plain reminder runs on a cadence you set — daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom number of days — and emails every customer holding an overdue invoice when the interval is due; weekly is the right default. The dunning ladder, once switched on, replaces it: each stage fires once per invoice at the number of days overdue you set, and an invoice never hears from two stages on the same day.
Do reminders escalate as the debt gets older?
With the dunning ladder on, yes. Each stage is keyed on days overdue and carries its own wording and channels — by default a friendly reminder at day one, a firm one at day seven, a final notice at day fourteen, and an escalation to your own team at day thirty. The plain reminder does not escalate: one cadence governs every debtor, so it is best kept for portfolios that only want the first rung automated.
What about tenants with no email address?
With the ladder on, a stage can send by SMS through your organization’s own SMS provider and by WhatsApp through its own approved template, so a tenant with only a phone number on record still hears from you. Every attempt — including one skipped for want of a contact — is recorded on the invoice’s history. The plain reminder is email only and passes over customers with no address.
Can we stop reminders for a tenant on a payment plan?
Yes — pause dunning on the customer’s record, and the ladder skips their invoices until you lift it. The pause does not end itself, so note the plan’s end date somewhere you actually look. A tenant who has agreed a plan and keeps receiving standard chasing reasonably concludes that the agreement means nothing.
Does the invoice show who was reminded and when?
With the ladder on, yes. Each invoice carries its chasing history — the stage, the channel, the recipient, and whether it was sent, failed or skipped. Record your own calls and letters alongside it, so a tribunal or a landlord asking what you did has a complete answer.
Can the ladder send a legal demand or charge interest?
A hand-off stage to your advocate or a collection agency, and automatic interest on overdue balances, are things we can add to your workspace. Today the top of the ladder is an escalation to your own team, which is where a demand letter belongs anyway: what it says carries legal weight, and the decision to send it should be a person’s.
