How I Automated Invoice Reminders in Make (And Stopped Being the Bad Guy)
Chasing invoices by hand is awkward and forgettable, which is why it never happens. A Make scenario with escalating reminders now does it politely, on schedule, every time.
Manual invoice chasing fails for a boring reason: the reminder you forget to send on Friday never gets sent, and by Monday you feel awkward enough to postpone it again. The fix is removing yourself from the timing entirely. My Make scenario watches the invoice tracker, and every unpaid invoice past its due date gets a reminder that is polite, escalated, and completely predictable, which turns out to be exactly what clients respect.
Set up the trigger on a schedule, not on an event. A scenario that runs every morning, pulls unpaid invoices from your tracker, whether that is a spreadsheet, an invoicing tool with an API, or an Airtable base, and filters for overdue ones, is more robust than trying to trigger off the invoice itself. The filter needs three branches: one to three days overdue, four to fourteen days, and fifteen plus, because escalating tone is the whole game.
Write the three emails now, while you are calm. The first reminder assumes an oversight, one short paragraph with the invoice attached and the due date restated. The second is neutral and specific, mentioning the aging and asking for a payment date. The third is firm, factual, and mentions next steps without threats. Storing these as data with variables for invoice number, amount, and due date means the scenario stays identical for every client, and the tone stays exactly what you chose on a good day.
Add the parts people skip: a stop condition so paid invoices drop out immediately, a Slack or email notification to yourself when an invoice hits the third stage, because that is when a human conversation should start, and a log sheet so you can see reminder history before you pick up the phone. The one hour I spent on error handling, what happens when the email address is missing, has already paid for itself twice.
Since automating this, overdue invoices dropped from a chronic problem to a rare one, mostly because consistent reminders signal a business that notices. Make is the right tool here rather than Zapier once you have a few escalation branches, but honestly, the tool matters less than the design principle: decide your reminder policy once, while calm, and let the scenario be the slightly awkward employee who never forgets and never apologizes.