When a customer says "I will pay on Friday", write it down
A promised date is the most useful thing a customer can tell you, and the first thing a reminder schedule ignores. How to record it, hold your reminders and know when to follow up.
"I will pay on Friday" is good news. It is also the sentence that most often gets lost. The reply lands in someone's inbox, the owner says "great", and then Friday arrives and the next automatic reminder goes out on Thursday, as if nobody had said a word.
A promise to pay needs three things: a date, a place to write it down, and a plan for the day after.
Get the date in writing
If the promise was made on the phone, send a one-line email back: "Thanks for the call. We have noted that invoice 1042 will be paid by Friday 14 March." That is not pushy. It gives the customer a date to meet and you a record to point to.
Pause the reminders, but only until that date
A promise should stop the reminders that would contradict it. It should not stop them forever. Pause until the promised date, and make sure something wakes the invoice up again the day after. A pause with no end date is how invoices go quiet for three months.
Keep a note of who made the promise. A comment from someone in accounts payable is different from a comment from the owner's contact.
Decide what a broken promise looks like
Agree with your client in advance what happens when the date passes. A sensible default is one gentle follow-up the next working day, asking for a new date. A second broken promise is the moment for the owner to pick up the phone. It is not the moment for a firmer email.
Do not chase a payment that has already landed
Before you follow up, check that the money has not already arrived and been recorded. In QuickBooks that means looking at the invoice itself and at undeposited funds and unapplied payments, not just at the report. See unapplied payments and credit memos.
Where Mugavi fits
On the payment page, the person paying can tap "I will pay on" and pick a day within 30 days. Reminders for that invoice pause until the day they chose, and you see it in your Inbox. They can also tap "Something is not right", which stops the reminders and tells you. A reply to a reminder pauses that invoice until you have read it. None of this replaces a phone call when a promise is broken. It makes sure the schedule does not talk over a promise while you are waiting. Mugavi reads your books, so the invoice closes when the payment is recorded in QuickBooks. The QuickBooks connection is in beta.
Related reading: what to do when a customer says they never got the invoice or disputes it, which overdue QuickBooks invoices to chase first.