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Automate Overdue-Invoice Follow-Ups

By the end of this recipe, no invoice will quietly age past due — Copera AI watches your finance board, drafts a polite reminder the moment a payment is late, and (with your sign-off) chases the client while pinging your finance owner. Because your invoices and your messaging live in one workspace, the follow-up happens on its own instead of waiting for someone to run an aging report.

Readiness: Available now (built as an Automation). The version where a named finance teammate owns collections end to end is rolling out in early access.

What it does​

Getting paid on time is mostly a chasing problem: the invoice is fine, the client just hasn't paid, and no one's followed up. Doing that follow-up by hand is tedious, so it slips — and cash flow slips with it. This recipe never forgets.

The automation watches each invoice's due date. When one passes due and is still unpaid, it:

  • Confirms it's actually unpaid (paid invoices are skipped).
  • Drafts a polite, on-brand reminder from the invoice details — client, amount, invoice number, due date.
  • Sends it — with a human approval step if you want one — to the client, and pings your finance owner so they know a chase went out.
  • Marks that a reminder was sent and, if the invoice stays unpaid, follows up again on a firmer schedule until it's paid.

You keep control of anything a client sees; the AI just makes sure the reminders are timely, professional, and relentless.

Build it yourself​

Track invoices on a board

On a finance board, keep each invoice as a row with client, amount, invoice number, due date, status (Sent / Paid / Overdue), an owner (assigned user), and the client's email. This board is your accounts-receivable source of truth. See Creating a Board to set it up.

Trigger: Date reached, after the due date

In Automations, add a Date reached trigger on the Due date field with an after offset — for example, 3 days after. It fires for a specific invoice three days past due.

Condition: Only unpaid invoices

Add a condition (a row filter) so the flow continues only when status is not Paid. No client who has paid should ever get a reminder.

AI step: Draft the reminder

Add an AI → Generate step that writes a courteous payment reminder from the row's details — the invoice number, amount, and due date: "Write a polite, professional reminder that this invoice is now past its due date and the balance is outstanding, with a friendly request to arrange payment."

Action: Approve before it goes to the client

Add a human approval request so a person reviews the drafted email before it sends — the safe default for anything client-facing. On approval, add an Email send action to the client's address (or use Email draft if your team always sends by hand).

Action: Notify the owner and log it

Add a Send direct message to the invoice's owner ("💸 A reminder just went out for this client — the invoice is 3 days overdue"), and a Set field action that flags "Reminder sent" and increments a reminder counter on the row so escalation can track how many have gone out.

tip

Escalate politely. Add more Date reached triggers at 7 days and 14 days past due, each with a firmer AI-drafted tone, and branch on the reminder counter with a condition so a client who's ignored two reminders gets a clearer third. Persistence, not nagging.

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Stop the moment they pay. Add a small companion automation with a Field changed trigger watching status → Paid that clears the "Reminder sent" flag and posts a "✅ This client just paid their overdue invoice" note to your finance channel. Now the chasing ends instantly when the money lands.

Or just ask Copera AI​

Need the state of your receivables right now? Open Ask Copera AI and ask:

"Look at our Invoices board and list every unpaid invoice that's past its due date, oldest first, with the client, amount, and days overdue. Draft a polite reminder email for each one."

Ask Copera AI reads the board, finds the overdue invoices, and drafts the reminders on the spot — a fast way to run collections on a Monday morning. Ask it to email the clients and, with Ask before acting on, it shows you each message before it sends. See What Copera AI Can Do for the actions it can take.

Make it a standing teammate​

Early access

Standing AI teammates are rolling out gradually. When one reaches your workspace, a named finance teammate can own the internal side of collections: watch every invoice, draft each overdue reminder on your escalation schedule, keep the board's status current, and brief your finance owner — on its own, under its own identity. The client-facing email itself stays with the Automation and its approval step, because a teammate never sends anything outside your workspace. Until then, the automation above does this today. Everything here can be built now as an Automation.

Tips​

tip

Keep a human on the client-facing send. A human approval step before the email is the safest way to let the AI move fast without an off-key or mistimed message going to a customer under your company's name.

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Let the tone match the relationship. Prompt the AI to write warmly for long-standing clients and more firmly for chronic late payers — you can branch on a "relationship" field so the same automation strikes the right note for each account.

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Set a spend cap. Since the drafting runs on a schedule across many invoices, give the automation a per-automation spend cap and watch the usage dashboard, so a busy AR month never runs past a budget you choose.

Frequently Asked Questions​

Can Copera chase overdue invoices automatically?​

Yes. An automation watches each invoice's due date. When one passes due and is still unpaid, it drafts a polite reminder and — after a quick human approval if you want one — emails the client and pings the internal owner, repeating on your schedule until the invoice is marked paid.

Does it email the client without me seeing it first?​

Only if you choose to. The recommended pattern puts a human approval step before any client-facing email, so a person signs off on the wording. You can also have it draft the reminder for your finance owner to send.

Does it escalate if the invoice stays unpaid?​

Yes. Set reminders at several points past due — day 3, day 7, day 14 — with a firmer tone each time, and count how many have gone out so late payers get progressively clearer follow-ups.

Does it stop once the invoice is paid?​

Yes. A condition checks the status before every reminder, and a companion flow watching for status changing to Paid stops the chasing, so a client who has paid never gets another nudge.

Where do the invoices come from?​

They live as rows on a finance board. You can enter them by hand, import them, or have new invoices land as rows automatically from a form or an inbound webhook, so the board stays current.