Dunning: payment reminder, first reminder and final reminder

With Payment reminders (dunning, German: Mahnwesen) you remind and chase overdue invoices in three fixed stages: Payment reminder → First reminder → Final reminder. Every reminder is a document of its own, with its own PDF and its own email to your customer. Univents suggests what is due — you send it with one click.

Where to find it

• Overview: Finance documents → Payment reminders. At the top you see how many invoices are open and their total.
• Settings: Settings → Documents → Payment reminders & dunning.
• On the invoice: in the invoice editor the Payment reminders card shows the history and offers Create reminder.
• On the dashboard: when invoices are due for a reminder, a notice links to the overview.

You don't have to switch anything on: dunning is active in every workspace on the Core plan and above. On a lower plan you see a plan notice instead. If you later drop below Core, existing reminders stay readable — new reminders and sending are locked.

Everyone with access to finances can view dunning; editing settings, sending, blocking and releasing needs permission to edit finances.

The overview: five tabs

What is chased is the open amount: invoice total minus payments and minus active partial credit notes. Once the invoice is paid, credited or cancelled, it disappears from every list. Any payment — via payment link, bank import, manually or from your accounting software — ends the dunning chain.

Setting up the three stages

Under Settings → Documents → Payment reminders & dunning you set for each stage:

With the defaults, the payment reminder is due 7 days, the first reminder 21 days and the final reminder 35 days after the due date. A stage is only due once the deadline of the previous reminder has passed. For workspaces in Switzerland all fees start at 0.

There is also:

• Charge default interest (from the 1st dunning notice) with its own interest rate. Univents shows the usual rate for business customers in your country as a guide.
• €40 late payment flat fee (business customers only)
• Attach the invoice as PDF — the reminder itself is always attached, the invoice in addition when this switch is on.
• Send payment reminders automatically (see below).

Fee, interest and flat fee

Every reminder shows a total claim: open amount + fees of earlier reminders + this stage’s fee + interest + flat fee. Fee, interest and flat fee are not revenue and carry no VAT.

• Fees accumulate: the total claim of a later stage includes the fees of the earlier ones.
• Default interest only applies from the first reminder, and only if you switched it on. It is suggested for business customers and runs from the day after the first reminder was sent up to the issue date: open amount × rate × days ÷ 365. Without a payment reminder or reminder sent before, the interest on the first reminder is 0. For private customers interest is set to 0; you can switch it on in the draft.
• Flat fee: €40 for business customers, euro only, once per invoice. It is offset against reminder fees already charged — fees and flat fee together come to at most €40 or, if your fees are higher, the sum of the fees. On the reminder the line reads “€40 late payment lump sum (less reminder fees)”.

You can change every amount in the draft before the reminder goes out. These are suggestions with cautious defaults and not legal advice — which fees and interest you may validly charge depends on your contracts and your country.

Payment link and “to be transferred in addition”

The reminder still contains the payment link. It pays the invoice amount, not the fees. Reminder fees, interest and flat fee appear with your bank details in the PDF and the email and are to be transferred in addition. For that you need your bank details (IBAN) in your company data. On an invoice with a partial credit note the link amount differs from the open amount — then the reminder has no link.

⚠️ Univents does not chase unpaid fees. As soon as the invoice is paid, the dunning chain ends — even if the customer never transferred the fees. They are not shown as open anywhere.

⚠️ Bank import: if the bank statement import finds the invoice number in the payment reference, it matches the payment to the invoice. If a customer transfers only the fees quoting the invoice number, that reduces the invoice’s open amount; if they transfer everything together, it looks like an overpayment. Check such payments in the payment reconciliation.

Sending a reminder

One by one

1. Reminder due tab → Preview & send in the row.
2. The dialog has the amounts prefilled and editable: fee, new payment deadline, interest, flat fee, recipient, Attach invoice as PDF and the text on the reminder. PDF preview shows exactly what the customer gets.
3. Send. The row shows “Being sent…” and then moves to Reminders sent. Once queued the draft can no longer be changed. Save draft and Discard draft are available as well.

If you chase earlier than planned, Univents asks once whether you want to send the reminder now anyway.

From the invoice itself it works the same way: Payment reminders card → Create reminder.

Selected invoices

Select rows (at most 50) and choose Send selected. Univents shows count, stages and total claim for confirmation. For invoices without a draft it creates a reminder with the default values; drafts you already edited go out unchanged. The emails follow within a few minutes.

Recipient, email templates and manual delivery

• The recipient can only be an address stored on the contact (main, invoice or order email, main contact person). Typing in an address is deliberately not possible.
• The email text comes from the email templates Payment reminder, First reminder and Final reminder (Settings → Email templates, see the article “Email templates”). Email and PDF go out in the document’s language and through the sender route of your system emails.
• If the contact has unsubscribed from invoice emails, has no address, or the reminder should go by post: download the PDF, deliver it yourself and use Mark as delivered manually in the dialog, or Mark as delivered in the card. The stage then counts as sent; the delivery date is the reference day for the next stage.

“Delivery unclear”

If sending is interrupted midway, Univents cannot be sure the email arrived. To avoid sending your customer a duplicate reminder with a fee, Univents does not resend by itself. The reminder shows as Delivery unclear. You decide: Mark as delivered if it arrived, or Send again — in which case the customer may get it twice. If sending fails for good (for example missing bank details, a switched-off template or a disconnected mailbox), the reason appears on the reminder as Not sent.

Reminder block

With Block reminders (row or invoice card, optionally with a reason such as “instalment plan agreed”), Univents suggests and sends nothing for this invoice. The invoice stays under Blocked until you choose Unblock. There is no block per customer. Univents also does not offset a down-payment invoice against its final invoice — block the invoice you don’t want chased.

Cut-off date and backlog invoices

Dunning never chases invoices that were due before the cut-off date — the day dunning started in your workspace (for new workspaces, the day it was created). The cut-off date is shown in the overview and in the settings. These invoices sit in the Backlog tab, because many of them were paid long ago, just not recorded in Univents. There you can, one by one or for selected rows (at most 50):

• Release for reminders — afterwards the invoice can be chased; you send every reminder yourself. Released backlog invoices are never chased automatically.
• Mark as paid — for invoices paid long ago. By default the customer gets no payment confirmation (Notify the customer about the payment) and the invoice is not transferred to your accounting software (Transfer to accounting; Lexware, sevdesk, bexio, BuchhaltungsButler) — right if you booked it there long ago. You can switch either on with a checkbox. No payment is booked. Active automations with the trigger “Invoice paid” still run for every marked invoice; the dialog tells you how many.
• Remove from reminders — the invoice gets a reminder block with the reason “Backlog settled”.

Automatic payment reminder

Under Settings → Documents → Payment reminders & dunning there is the switch Send payment reminders automatically. It is off by default and has to be switched on once. Univents then sends the payment reminder (stage 1 only) every morning for new cases — but only for invoices whose reminder date falls after you switched it on. Older due invoices, backlog invoices and the two reminder stages still only go out on your click. The setting shows since when automation has been active.

If you also have an automation with the trigger “Invoice overdue” that sends an email, your customer gets two messages about the same invoice — the settings warn you about this.

What used to be different

Setting “Send reminders” and “Remind” on the invoice, and the internal follow-up task, no longer exist. To follow up internally, use the overview, the dashboard notice or an automation “Invoice overdue → Create task”.

AI assistant

The AI assistant can operate dunning: read the overview, change settings, create drafts, set blocks, release backlog invoices. Sending and releasing never happen without your explicit confirmation in the chat.

Frequently asked questions

Why isn’t my overdue invoice under “Reminder due”? Usually it is a backlog invoice (due before the cut-off date), blocked, below the first threshold, or paid or credited. The card on the invoice names the reason.

An invoice was corrected — how is it chased? The corrected invoice starts a new dunning chain; the old one drops out.

Does the customer see the reminder in the customer portal? No, reminders go by email and PDF.

What if even the final reminder has no effect? Then the invoice sits under Exhausted. Debt collection or court proceedings happen outside Univents.