How to build collections and dunning

What matters here

• Age at the customer level. Four invoices thirty days late is a different conversation from one invoice a hundred and twenty days late.
• Check suppression before every message, not once at the start. Payments, disputes and renewals all appear mid-sequence.
• Never dun an account in an active renewal or with an open escalation without the account owner knowing first.
• Stop automating at the point a person is needed. A fifth automated email is not a collections strategy.
• Measure days sales outstanding, not emails sent. The second number always goes up and means nothing.

Who this is for

You run credit control or finance operations. Chasing is manual, inconsistent, and the accounts that get chased are the ones somebody remembered rather than the ones costing the most.

How it works in practice

What has to happen between an invoice going overdue and the money arriving.

1. 1

   Balances are aged per customer, not per invoice

   Because a customer with four small late invoices needs a different conversation from one with a single large one.

2. 2

   Suppression is checked before every send

   Paid, disputed, in an active renewal, on a payment plan, or flagged by the account owner.

3. 3

   Tone and channel escalate with age

   A gentle reminder, then a firmer one, then a call task, then a person. Not the same email four times.

4. 4

   The account owner is told before anything firm goes out

   A commercial relationship is worth more than the invoice, and they may already know why it is late.

5. 5

   A payment or a dispute stops the ladder immediately

   Not at the next scheduled run. Chasing somebody who paid yesterday is the fastest way to lose their goodwill.

6. 6

   Automation hands over to a person at the end

   Past the last rung it is a human conversation, with everything already gathered.

Paste these into Claude Code or Codex with the Tray Headless plugin installed. Each stage runs on its own. The systems named in them are the worked example rather than a requirement, and every prompt says so.

Once per project, run /tray-workflows:set-workspace to pick the workspace these build in. Point it at a sandbox first.

1. 1

   Start here: find where the reasons to stop live

   Suppression state is scattered, and it is the part that protects the relationship.

   Headless skills build-workflow

   Copy

   Use build-workflow. The systems in play are NetSuite and Salesforce,
   or whatever we run in those seats.
   
   I need invoices with due dates, payment state and any dispute flag, plus
   the customer record and payment terms. From Salesforce I need open
   opportunities, renewal dates and the account owner.
   
   Map where each of these lives: paid, disputed, on a payment plan, in an
   active renewal, and manually held. Those five are the reasons not to
   send, and none of them are in the same place.

2. 2

   Age at the customer level

   Because a person receives the emails, not an invoice.

   Headless skills build-workflow

   Copy

   Use build-workflow. Build ageing per customer, not per invoice:
   
     Total outstanding, and how much falls in each ageing bucket
     The oldest unpaid invoice and its age
     Count of overdue invoices
     Whether this customer is usually on time, which changes the tone
   
   Never send one email per overdue invoice. A customer with four late
   invoices should receive one message listing all four, not four messages
   in one morning, which reads as a system rather than a company.

3. 3

   Build the ladder, and check suppression before every send

   The state that stops a message usually appears mid-sequence.

   Copy

   Build the escalation ladder, with tone and channel changing by age:
   
     due plus 3     a gentle reminder to the billing contact, with the
                    invoice and a payment link attached
     due plus 14    a firmer reminder, copying the AP contact
     due plus 30    notify the account owner, then email the billing
                    contact referencing the terms
     due plus 45    a call task for credit control, no further automation
     due plus 60    handoff, with the full history assembled
   
   Before every single send, check suppression: paid, part paid since the
   last message, disputed, on a payment plan, in an active renewal, or held
   by the account owner.
   
   Check at send time. A customer who paid yesterday receiving today's chase
   is the most common and most damaging failure here.

   The account owner notification at 30 days matters more than the email that follows it. They often already know why it is late, and sometimes they are the reason.

4. 4

   Protect the commercial relationship

   Because the invoice is worth less than the account.

   Headless skills tray-gotchas

   Copy

   Use tray-gotchas, then add these guards:
   
   An account with a renewal inside the next quarter never gets past the
   second rung without the account owner approving it.
   
   An account with an open severity one support escalation is suppressed
   entirely until the escalation closes. Chasing somebody whose service is
   broken is indefensible.
   
   A disputed invoice leaves the ladder and goes to a dispute queue. It is
   not overdue, it is contested, and treating it as overdue makes the
   dispute worse.
   
   Partial payment resets the tone but not the age. Somebody paying
   something is engaging, and the message should acknowledge it.

5. 5

   Measure days outstanding, not messages sent

   One of those numbers is the point and the other always rises.

   Copy

   Report weekly:
   
     Days sales outstanding, trended, overall and by segment
     Total overdue by ageing bucket
     Promise-to-pay kept rate, where a customer said a date
     Suppression events by reason, which shows how often the ladder was
     about to do something it should not
     Escalations to a person, and what happened after
   
   Do not report emails sent as a success measure. It rises whether or not
   anybody pays, and optimising for it produces exactly the behaviour that
   damages accounts.

6. 6

   Test it, then hand the ladder to credit control

   Because tone and timing are a commercial judgement.

   Copy

   Run the per-step schema checks and the whole-workflow audit before this
   touches production. Run it in preview for a fortnight first: compute what
   would send, send nothing, and have credit control read the list.
   
   Then open the same workflow in Tray Build so credit control can adjust
   the rungs, the tone and the suppression rules in the visual canvas.

What it connects to

The ledger holds the debt, the CRM holds the relationship, and both decide whether to send.

Named systems are the ones most teams run, not the only ones that work. Each is an authentication in your Tray workspace, referenced by name, so the workflow never holds a credential. Where we have a connector page, the name links to it.

Questions people ask

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