Automatic overdue reminders and your donors
Credit control e-mails overdue reminders and monthly statements by default. Decide whether donors and sponsors with open pledge invoices should get them.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Non-profit businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Picture a retired teacher who pledged a monthly gift to your feeding scheme, and whose pledge you invoiced so the books would show it. She falls ill, misses a payment, and a week later receives an e-mail headed "Payment overdue" with an invoice attached. Then another. Then a statement. Nobody at your organisation wrote those messages, and nobody meant them, but she will remember them.
Automatic reminders are one of the most useful tools a business has for getting paid. For a non-profit, the same tool can land on the wrong people in the wrong tone. Whether it does depends on a setting most organisations never look at until a supporter complains.
This article explains what Achekam's credit control sends, when, and how to decide whether it suits the donors and sponsors on your books.
It is switched on unless you change it
Credit control is on for new workspaces. Once a day it looks at customers with a balance and e-mails overdue reminders and a monthly statement of account. It never charges anyone: there are no saved cards or debit orders behind it, and the reminder e-mails carry no pay link. It records whether each e-mail actually went out.
Two practical points follow. First, if your organisation invoices pledges, sponsorships or event tables through receivables, those people are customers in the books, and credit control treats them like any other customer. Second, e-mails only go out if the workspace's e-mail settings work. If they do not, nothing is sent, and the record shows it was not.
What goes out, and when
When an invoice is issued it takes the next number in its sequence and posts to the ledger, and unless you change them its terms are 30 days. The reminder clock starts from the due date.
By default, reminders go at 7, 14 and 30 days overdue, each with the invoice PDF attached. Separately, customers with a balance receive a monthly statement of account, a PDF of what they owe, and the screen shows whether each statement was sent.
For a commercial customer, that rhythm is ordinary. For a supporter, three reminders and a statement inside roughly a month can feel like being chased by a debt collector over a promise they made in good faith.
Why a pledge is not a trade debt
A sponsor that bought advertising in your annual report, or a company that booked a table at your fundraising dinner, received something in return. An invoice and a reminder are normal business between organisations, and their accounts departments expect them.
A pledge from an individual is different. It records an intention to give. Many people pledge with the best will and then lose a job, face a family emergency or simply forget. The right response to a missed pledge payment is usually a personal call or a warm note, not an automated message with "overdue" in the subject line. Donor-centred fundraising treats the relationship as the asset; the pledge is only one expression of it.
There is also a reputational side. A board member who hears that a long-standing donor received a string of reminders will want to know who decided that, and "the system did it" is not a satisfying answer.
Using the ageing view instead
You do not need automated e-mails to know which pledges are slipping. Receivables are aged into 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120 and over 120 days, with overdue totals. That view is a ready-made list for a fundraiser to work through by hand.
A simple monthly routine:
- Open the aged receivables and pick out the pledges from the commercial invoices.
- For each overdue pledge, decide who should make contact: the fundraiser who knows the donor, not finance.
- Call or write personally. Ask how they are before you mention the pledge.
- If the donor wants to reduce, pause or end the pledge, agree how the books should reflect it with your accountant.
- Where a donor asks for a record of what they have given and what is outstanding, e-mail them a statement of account yourself, so you choose the moment and add a covering note.
The ICAEW's helpsheet on chasing debtors and unpaid invoices makes a point that applies even more strongly to donors: check your own processes first and chase informally before taking firmer steps.
Deciding your setting before the first pledge invoice
Make the decision deliberately, before the first pledge is invoiced, and write it down. The questions to answer:
- Who is on receivables? List the kinds of people you invoice: commercial sponsors, event buyers, corporate pledges, individual pledges, membership fees.
- Who should receive automatic e-mails? If the answer is "only the commercial ones", consider whether individual pledges belong in receivables at all, or whether you record them when the money arrives. That is an accounting choice to agree with your accountant, because it changes how pledged income appears in your reports.
- Should credit control stay on? If most of your receivables are donors, switching it off and chasing personally from the ageing view may serve you better. If most are commercial, leaving it on and keeping individual pledges out of receivables may be cleaner.
- Do the e-mail settings work? Test them, so that if reminders are on, they actually arrive, and if a statement is sent by hand, it reaches the donor.
- Who reads the send record? Someone should glance at which reminders and statements went out each week, so that a complaint never comes as a surprise.
When money comes in twice instead
Reminders are about money that has not arrived. The opposite problem, a donor paying the same pledge twice through a gateway, needs its own steps; see when a donor pays the same pledge twice online. If you are about to start taking card or online payments on pledge invoices, setting up your payment gateway explains the connection.
Look at your current receivables list today, and ask of each name: would this person be pleased or upset to receive an automatic reminder from us tomorrow?
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
