AWRA Help Center

The dunning ladder is off until you switch it on. SMS and WhatsApp go through your organization’s own SMS provider and approved WhatsApp template, so each message costs you money, and nothing is sent because a default appeared. Until it is on, the ordinary daily invoice reminder email runs as before.

Setting Up The Ladder

1. Open Settings → Sales & POS → Dunning Ladder.
2. Review the stages. Each one fires at a number of days overdue, on one or more channels — email, SMS, WhatsApp, or internal (a bell notice and email to your admins rather than the customer) — with its own subject and message. Up to eight stages.
3. Write the messages with placeholders: {customer}, {invoice}, {amount}, {due_date}, {days_overdue}, {pay_link} and {business}.
4. Switch the ladder on and save.

The default ladder is a friendly reminder on day 1 (email and SMS), a firm reminder on day 7 and a final notice on day 14 (email, SMS and WhatsApp), and an escalation to your team on day 30. {pay_link} opens the pay-now page when you collect through IntaSend, and otherwise the customer portal, where the customer pays by M-Pesa or card.

When A Stage Goes Out

• The ladder runs once a day over unpaid invoices past their due date.
• Each stage reaches each of its channels once per invoice, ever. Every attempt is recorded — sent, failed or skipped — so nothing is repeated the next day.
• An invoice never hears from two stages on the same day.
• The latest stage due wins: an invoice already 20 days overdue when the ladder is switched on gets the day-14 notice, and the stages it jumped are recorded as skipped.
• Email still obeys the customer reminder email switch and your plan’s daily email allowance. A channel that cannot be used (no phone number, no provider) is recorded as skipped or failed with the reason.
• Rewording a stage keeps its history; moving it to a different day makes it a new stage.

When It Stops

• The invoice is paid. Only invoices with a balance are read.
• The customer is paused. Open the customer and use the Collections panel to pause or resume dunning — for a dispute or an agreed payment plan. On resume, each invoice gets the stage due now, not the ones it missed.
• A recurring auto-charge is still retrying. The charge is tried first; the invoice reaches the ladder only once it gives up. See Recurring Invoices.

History

Every invoice shows its dunning history — the stage, channel, date and outcome of each attempt. That is the answer when a customer says nobody told them.

Permissions

• Manage dunning — edit and switch on the ladder, and pause or resume a customer.
• View invoices — see an invoice’s dunning history.

The ladder, the invoice history and the customer pause are also in the mobile app.