Collection troubleshooting - what blocks my reminders

As you may have seen already, we mention your collection reminders triggers in dedicated articles, for customer-level or invoice-level collection. In certain cases, you may expect for reminders to be sent/triggered to your customers, yet, it doesn’t seem to be happening as expected. This can be due to diverse conditions or situations. Let’s break them down. You can check your customer’s collection state from:

• The Actions list view > All section filtered
• Their timeline - check their latest reminder and date
• Their detail page (top right)

Let’s first focus on what we see from the customer detail page at the top right!

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No action to do

If you see the following on your customer’s page, either:

1. They have no outstanding invoices, therefore, no reminder can be triggered for them. If you need to contact them, you can use our Campaign or Ad hoc actions features.
2. The customer is assigned to an empty workflow or “No workflow”.
3. They have open invoices, but their balance is null or negative, due to unapplied transactions. In this case, we invite you to apply as many transactions as possible from your accounting tool. If you identify discrepancies, please submit a support request sharing the following examples:

• Customer name(s)
• References
• Screenshots of the latter from your tool

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Actions to-do

A manual action is pending and is waiting to be managed by its owner(s). If the button is Blue, you are the action owner or one of them. Click the button, which will redirect you to your To do list and send or ignore the action. If the button is white, it means you’re not assigned to the action. You can see the action name and owner(s) by clicking the button. You can see more information from your Actions list view, All section, by filtering on the status “To do” + “Due date” = today’s date, and search by customer name if needed. You’ll see how long it has been pending and who should have managed it. This can also be related to missing or invalid contacts to update.

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Next (automatic) action scheduled

This information mentions when the next action is planned/scheduled for.

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Check your workflow minimum contact delay

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Actions scheduled later than expected

You may see Next manual/automation [action] scheduled on date for your customer(s), but don’t understand why they’re not due now, based on the invoice’s age and the action’s trigger. But depending on the last action’s performed date and your workflow minimum contact delay (MCD), there might be a bigger delay than expected. The MCD is here to ensure your customers are not contacted within the delay you set up, to avoid spamming them. Which means that, if you have two reminders with triggers that are less than the MCD, the latter will apply and delay the following action. For example, your MCD is 5 days (default), but your 2nd reminder is planned 7 days after the date, and your 3rd reminder is 10 days after the date. Here, we only have 3 days between those two reminders, when we have a 5-day MCD. The 3rd reminder will then be sent 12 days after the due date, instead of 10, to respect the MCD. Based on your process and needs, we advise to either:

• Change your reminders triggers to respect the MCD
• Decrease the MCD to adapt to your triggers

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Actions triggered sooner than expected

Similar to the above scenario, certain actions can be triggered sooner than what you would expect. For example, if you planned a delay of 10 days between two reminders: The 2nd reminder was sent, but the 3rd reminder was sent 5 days later, when you would expect it to be sent 10 days later. This might be due to the carrying invoice age. If the latter is older than the trigger, the workflow will only apply the minimum contact delay between performed actions. Same as above, you might want increasing the minimum contact delay in your workflow or create a dedicated workflow for customers with old carrying invoices.