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QuickBooks 2020 has added some useful features. If you need to remind customers from time to time that you’re still waiting on a payment, QuickBooks can help with that.

QuickBooks has always had the ability to customize letters using data, like customer names, balances, etc., in your company file. What QuickBooks 2020 does is add a layer of automation that may save you time.

This feature is called Automated Customer Payment Reminders. Let’s see how it works.

Navigate to Customers->Payment Reminders->Manage Mailing List.

There’s actually more than one step, but the wizard for creating your mailing list is pretty straightforward and easy to follow. The reason you may want more than one mailing list is that you may not treat all your customers the same. You might choose wording in a reminder for one group of customers different from the wording you would like to use with another, perhaps less trusted, group of customers.

You don’t have to have multiple mailing lists though. You can have one and all (or most) of your customers can be included.

Once at least one mailing list has been selected, it’s time to create the schedule.

In the screenshot above, you can see the steps in the reminder setup process. We have created a reminder, 1 day after due date, in the first window. The second window (to the right), allows us to edit the text that should be included in the message emailed to the customer.

Note the circled “[Name-First-Last]” text. Bracketed test like this indicates data that will come from QuickBooks. The customer’s name will appear here. Invoice number is filled in a couple of lines above. In the body of the message you can see where QuickBooks will pull information from the company file like invoice total, company information, etc.

You can include additional fields of custom info by clicking on the Insert Field button in the lower right, selecting the data field you want, and placing it in the message.  

There are some new preferences that control how the feature works. As you can see from the above screenshot, we can turn Payment Reminders on or off. We can tell QuickBooks when to remind us and how often to look for customers that meet our mail list criteria.

So, with our setup so far, here’s what QuickBooks will do.

Each day QuickBooks scans our customers and the status of their open invoices. If it finds a customer that is on the mailing list we specified at the beginning of this process AND that customer has an invoice that is unpaid, but was due yesterday, QuickBooks will notify us at 10:00 the day the invoice becomes delinquent.

If we decide to send the reminder, we are presented with the following screen. If we have set everything up the way we would like this feature to function, we should only have to click Send Now and the message is sent, hopefully to generate some action on the part of our customer.

QuickBooks also keeps a record of the emails we’ve sent. See the screenshot below. In the Customer Center, Sent Forms tab, is a record of all emails transmitted to this customer including the reminders we’ve sent.