Discover the Ideal Invoice Reminder Template for Teams

Invoice reminder template for teams

hi everyone today we're going to be talking about an automation that is quite prevalent in most businesses I mean what's the core of business right you're providing services or products to generate Revenue every single business needs to send invoices or some type of payment method in order to generate that Revenue however for small businesses and Freelancers this step can cause a lot of headaches I mean you're providing the products or you're providing the services that's a huge part of your business but what happens when your clients don't pay when they're supposed to or even just managing that when they are paying and just making sure everything's getting to the right place can be a little difficult I mean who knows how much time you spend per week or even per year dealing with invoices and making sure your clients pay on time well that's kind of why we decided to build out just just this quick automation to show you that it's actually possible to automate that step right automate really the the core reminder email that you're going to have to send out to anyone who's a little late on their payments or a little late on filling out the invoice um and it's quite important right I mean you can definitely hit that reminder button uh some some platforms actually do have a button where you can hit it once and it's going to immediately send that reminder email out and just say hey by the way you haven't paid uh by the uh just make sure that you complete the payment um but who knows maybe you want to make it a little bit more personalized and you don't have much access to it within your platform or maybe you want to send a an extra reminder email after a certain amount of time or maybe you don't even have the ability to send the reminder email out within your platform with one or two clicks maybe you just need to do something externally to make sure that that happens well that's that's what we're going to be talking about so there's a lot of different platforms that offer invoices right I mean one of the most common ones is QuickBooks Online uh but you also have square stripe Bonsai honey books list goes on and on and on um fresh books so the first thing that you need to do once you open your zaper up is to make sure that the application that you are using is within the apps on Z Z or whatever no code automation tool you're using today we're going to be using zapier so for instance say I'm looking for stripe got to type it in there it is Boom next thing is is we're going to create the trigger event right and the important thing about this event is it needs to be associated with the invoice now with stripe I mean you have this invoice payment failed but we really want to find the event that is a new invoice because we want this to trigger on basically every invoice and it's always good not necessarily on this automation but to see if you can find an instant trigger right because that's going to allow for you to immediately start that automation as soon as someone or as soon as you send out that new invoice now what we're going to do is we're going to set up a delay step and the delay step right here is we are going to pause this action for a certain time and sometimes when you have a new unfortunately I don't have a stripe account so I can't really show you exactly what it's going to say but once you test this right at the very bottom it's going to show you maybe the payment due date the invoice due date if there's a due date you want to delay until that particular thing or the easiest way to do that is to use the scheduler but unfortunately it's not something we can do as an action so we have to delay it so a lot of times businesses have a structured way of when they want to make their deadline sometimes it's the day of sometimes it's a week in advance or I'm sorry a week after the thought so you just want to queue up your delay for that much time right um and sometimes it'll even give you like okay this was processed on this particular date you can delay it for a week right or you can delay it for a day or you can delay it for a few hours and you would do that just by doing this one hour and that's how you would do that one week four weeks whatever it is so there's your delay right and what we're trying to do is we're trying to delay it to a time that's past the deadline of your invoice the reason why we do that is then we're going to add a filter step and this filter step is going to be based on two things number one that this invoice was not paid so sometimes there's a payment was true or false or invoice completed was true or false um if it's a Boolean then you want to make sure that it is if it's false we want to continue and if it matches any of these constraints it's going to leave this zap right so I'm sorry if it doesn't matter so if you say that this is false if they did make the payment good they leave the zap right but if they didn't they continue uh and then you have an option here right you can literally just say all right the payment was not completed so they need to continue to the reminder email or what you could do is make it so that if the deadline has passed right and they haven't paid uh and you could also do that as an and step too but just to keep it simple or worry about the fall so again you would deadline is before today's date and this will give you the date that it will delay until so you can pop that date right in there so right there is our filter right so if they did pay or if the deadline has already had and the deadline has already passed so if they did not pay and the deadline is already passed right here then they would proceed to The Next Step because it needs to fit both of those constraints they have not paid and the deadline has already passed which means that they are we need to remind them that the invoice exists because it's still do so what we want to do is we have a few options here number one you can go ahead and immediately send them an email you can do this in a lot of different ways say for instance you have an email marketing platform like MailChimp boom it's there but say you just want to send it from your Gmail boom what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a draft or you could even literally just send the email right away and that way you're sending that reminder email and you can stop right there that is literally all you need for this flow to send this reminder email however say for instance you send this reminder email and they still do not pay the invoice well chances are we probably want to send another one so within this event say for instance you choose send an email it's going to show my account but that's all right right here you're going to enter the body and you can literally write whatever you want in here and you can even use information from the invoice hey I sent you an invoice on this date um I just want to make sure that you have paid the total of this much or you could literally just say hey Carl I don't know um just wanted to let you know that uh the invoice for this project was not paid uh once you get a set could you please finish the invoice for me cool and you just want to fill out these Fe Fields so that when this does happen it sends that email out and the most important thing is definitely putting within the to the email that you sent the invoice to because um you don't want to actually put the email in and like type it in you want to put it in from this new invoice uh so that the data point shows up which would allow for you to then use this Zap for every single one of your clients so again that's why it's important in the body to put information from that invoice as well hi first name field I just wanted to let you know I sent you an invoice on uh due dat field it's really that easy but again you want to make sure that you're pulling the data from here so that it works for every single one of your customers um but say for instance this one doesn't work what we want to do is once again delay you can even put a filter right here and say all right has it been paid but chances are they're not going to paid immediately so you want to put another delay on it and then you're going to delay for one week or one day or whatever it may be um and you could also use so for for instance on this one if you wanted to you could also say delay until and then put the the deadline right in here that's one thing I forgot to mention but if you delay for a week then you would go back with that filter again um and you could even just literally copy this and paste it um and that way you could even add to the filter if this was sent then proceed with this so if it was sent and the payment has still not been paid then you would add once again another Gmail so again you don't need all of this however if you do decide to use all of this this is going to give you two different reminder emails with different body text that are personalized to the person that you sent the invoice to and say for instance you're working with 20 clients right typically taking the time out of your day to check if they have not paid their invoice which again most platforms will literally tell you but also going into your own email and sending them an email is going to take you a good 10 minutes maybe more so if you're doing this with with 10 20 leads or even five leads that's taking a good hour out of your day so if you cue this up this is going to work for you really until you you turn it off to send those automated invoice reminder emails so that you get the most out of every single booking that comes through your business