Invoice Overdue Letter

Our “invoice overdue” reminder letter template is the first letter that we recommend your sending. It is part of a good credit control process. An invoice overdue letter may also be known as a payment overdue letter or a debt chaser letter. Once you have bought our template, you can reuse it as many times as you need. You need only pay once.

Invoice Overdue Letters

This invoice overdue letter reminds the customer that their account has become overdue. It acts as a reminder rather than a severe warning letter. At this early stage in pursuing overdue payments, we do not recommend an overly aggressive approach. A friendly reminder letter, such as our template, is all that you need at this point.

If the invoice remains unpaid after, say, a further 14 days, then we recommend progressing to a slightly more formal late payment letter. The last letter in the process of pursuing payment would then be the final demand for payment letter. If you come to an agreement about a disputed debt, then use our Debt Settlement Letter to record the terms of it.

Issuing an Invoice Overdue Letter

You will find that generally a customer will pay their overdue account once they are sent this initial reminder letter, notifying them that payment is overdue.

For this reason, it is good practice to set up a system where the day after an invoice becomes overdue the first reminder letter is sent promptly. This will also confirm to new customers or clients that you take credit control seriously. It should help to establish a good pattern with them.

We have created our debt chaser letter template so that you can easily create your own letter in just minutes. Keeping on top of business debts is key to achieving a steady cashflow, and cashflow is critical to the success of your business.

A legally-worded, yet friendly, invoice overdue letter is ideal for use as the first letter to send out once payment is overdue.

Credit control tips

As well as promptly chasing debts that are overdue with our invoice overdue letter, another element to good credit control is not giving too much credit to any customer. Avoid extending further credit if previous invoices are overdue. Bear in mind the impact if the customer goes bust. Try to carry out a credit check on all new customers and also regularly on on-going customers. Also look out for unusual payment behaviour, e.g. where a previously prompt payer, starts to delay payment. This will give you a good warning if they might be about to go bust. At such a point, you will want to avoid increasing the level of credit you give them.

For the other letters in our debt collection suite, click on this link.