Payment schedules and automatic payment reminders

One of the real benefits of having a system manage your bookings is that it can chase payments for you. Customers can make a full or partial payment against any booking at any time, through their client portal, and you can set up automatic reminders that nudge them when a balance is still outstanding, without anyone on your team having to track it by hand.

Building a payment reminder automation

Go to Automations and create a new one. Give it a name, something like Payment Reminder, then open it to start building.

Add a trigger called A Booking Is Started. This trigger supports an offset, letting you set it to fire a set amount of time before the booking actually begins. If you want reminders starting three months before the event, set the offset to three months before, and the automation begins running from that point.

Only reminding customers who actually owe something

You don’t want this emailing every customer regardless of whether they’ve paid, since that feels automated and pointless to anyone who’s already settled their balance in full. This is where a logic step comes in.

Click the plus icon and add an If Else branch. Set the condition to check whether the quote is not paid in full. This gives you a True branch and a False branch, and since you only care about customers who still owe something, everything useful happens on the True side.

On the True branch, add an Email action. Inside it, you’ll find an Action Name field, which is just a label for the step itself, and an Email Account section, defaulting to your System Email unless you choose a different connected account or connect a new one. Set the To field using the customer’s email variable, so it’s addressed to the right person automatically, then write your subject line and message.

There’s also a Draft checkbox on this step. Leave it unticked and the email sends automatically once the automation runs. Tick it, and the automation creates a draft instead of sending straight away, ready for someone on your team to check and send manually. This is the same drafts system covered in the conversations article, where automations can prepare a message and leave the final decision to a person, and this is exactly where that setting lives when you’re building it into a payment reminder.

Chaining multiple reminders into one automation

You don’t need a separate automation for every reminder date. The whole sequence lives inside a single automation, chained together using Wait nodes.

After your first email goes out on the True branch, add a Wait node set to whatever gap you want before the next reminder, a month, for example. After the wait, repeat the same pattern, another If Else check for whether the balance is still not paid in full, followed by another email if it isn’t.

Repeating the check each time matters just as much as repeating the email. If a customer pays between reminders, that later check catches it and stops them getting chased again for a balance that’s already settled.

So a single automation might start three months before the event, send a reminder, wait a month, check again and send a second reminder two months out if nothing’s changed, then repeat the same pattern once more closer to the date. Keep chaining the same Wait, check, email pattern as many times as you need, right up to the event itself, and payment gets chased consistently without you building or maintaining several separate automations to do it.

An example reminder email

Subject: Your payment is due soon

Hi {customer first name},

We’re looking forward to your event on {event date}. Just a quick reminder that you still have a balance of {balance due} outstanding on your booking.

You can make a payment at any time through your client portal, in full or in part, whichever suits you best.

If you’ve already paid or have any questions, just reply to this email and let us know.

Kind regards, {business name}

Switching it on

Once you’re happy with it, set the automation to Active and click Save.

From that point on, every booking that reaches three months before its event date, or whatever offset you’ve chosen, gets checked automatically. Anyone with an outstanding balance gets a reminder. Anyone already paid in full is left alone, exactly as it should be.