Debt Collection System: Automatically Following Up Unpaid Invoices

With the debt collection system in Plug&Pay you can automatically follow up your unpaid invoices. Send reminders and notices of default and automatically charge collection fees.

Once you start working with payments, you will notice that not every invoice gets paid. For example, you manually create an invoice that remains unpaid. You have a subscription and a customer reverses the payments, even though they should be paid. Or you sell an instalment payment for which payments are being declined.

Manually sending reminders to collect the payment takes a lot of time. With the debt collection system this happens automatically, so you can spend your time and focus on something else!

You can activate the debt collection process. In this process, three reminders are sent. With the 4th reminder, collection fees are charged.

You can connect with Pingen for sending letters. With the third, fourth, and fifth reminder, a letter is also sent to the customer.

You can choose what costs you charge as collection fees.

To activate the debt collection system, go to Debtors in the menu. You will then arrive on a screen where you can activate the debt collection system.

You will then arrive on the page with all the settings. On the left you can see the debt collection process.

You can see here on which day which email or letter is sent. With the eye icon you can view the content of the letter/email.

The Plug&Pay debt collection process is an existing process in which you cannot make changes. You cannot change the number of days between reminders, the number of reminders, or the content of the reminders.

You can also update the email address for sending reminders. For example, you might have a separate email address for your administration. If you also set this email address under Reply to, you will also receive the replies to reminders in the correct mailbox.

Under costs you can set the amount of your collection fees. This is a fixed amount and applies to every invoice, regardless of the price of that invoice. If the invoice has still not been paid after multiple reminders, these collection fees are added.

You can also under Other choose whether you want to send payment reminders for one-click upsells. This option exists because some shop owners are less strict about unpaid invoices for one-click upsells.

You can also choose whether you want to show your Account number on the invoice.

By default, a payment link is sent with the reminders. It is most convenient if customers pay via this payment link, as the status of the invoice in Plug&Pay is then automatically updated. If you show your account number on the invoice, customers may transfer the amount manually. In that case, you will need to manually update the status of the invoice in Plug&Pay.

In the dashboard of the debt collection system you will find a number of statistics. Under outstanding you can see the total amount of outstanding invoices. Under additional revenue you can see the amount you have earned with the debt collection system. These are invoices that were previously unpaid but have been paid due to the reminders.

Under process you can quickly see how many invoices are in which step of the debt collection process. You can click on this step and then see directly which invoices this concerns.

In the action centre you can see immediately when action is required from you. This can happen for example when invoices have gone through the process. These invoices are still unpaid despite the reminders. You can choose whether to take further action to get these invoices paid, or to write them off (credit them).

Do you not only want to send reminders by email, but also by letter? You can! You can connect Plug&Pay with Pingen to have these letters sent automatically. You can read more about this in the separate article about Pingen.

Once the debt collection system is active, the process runs for invoices that are unpaid from that moment onwards. The debt collection process is therefore not activated for invoices that were already unpaid before you activated the debt collection system.