How to Write a Payment Reminder: Templates and Best Practices

What a Herinnering Factuur Actually Does (and When to Send One)

A herinnering factuur, or payment reminder, is a written notice you send a customer after an invoice passes its due date without payment. Done right, it recovers cash without damaging the relationship. Send a first reminder within 7 to 14 days of the due date, be specific about what is owed and by when, and keep the tone factual rather than accusatory. That is the whole formula.

Most late payments are not disputes. According to Atradius's Payment Practices Barometer for Western Europe, roughly 50% of B2B invoices in the Netherlands are paid late, but the majority of those resolve with a single reminder. The invoice slipped through someone's inbox. The payment run was scheduled for next week. A polite nudge is enough. Save the firmer tone for the second and third contact.

The Sequence: How Many Reminders, and How Far Apart

A standard three-step sequence works well for most B2B operations:

1. First reminder — 7 to 14 days after the due date. Neutral tone, assume an oversight.
2. Second reminder — 14 days after the first. Firmer, reference the outstanding amount again, set a clear new deadline.
3. Final notice — 7 to 14 days after the second. State the consequence: late-payment interest, handover to a collection agency, or credit hold.

Some industries move faster. If you are in electrical wholesale or wholesale and distribution, where margins are thin and payment terms are often 30 days or less, you might compress the first reminder to day 5. The right cadence depends on your customer mix and your own working capital needs, not on a universal rule.

One thing that does not change: always reference the original invoice. Invoice number, date, amount, due date, and your payment details in every message. Customers who genuinely want to pay cannot do so if they have to hunt for the invoice again.

Timing a Herinnering Factuur: The Common Mistakes

The most common mistake is waiting too long. Ops teams often hold off out of politeness, letting a 30-day overdue invoice drift to 60 or 90 days before anyone sends a note. By then, recovering the cash is harder, and the customer has de-prioritised the debt.

The second mistake is sending a reminder too early. Firing a chaser two days after the due date, before the customer's payment run has even processed, creates friction for no reason. A 7-day buffer after the due date is a reasonable default.

A practical tip: check your own data first. If your ERP shows that a specific customer consistently pays on day 38 of a 30-day term, a reminder on day 35 will land better than one on day 7. That context is sitting in your order-to-cash process data; use it.

How to Write a Professional Payment Reminder

Structure matters more than language. A reminder that buries the invoice number in paragraph three is harder to act on than a bad-tempered one that puts the amount in the first line.

What every reminder needs:

• Your company name and contact details
• Customer name and address
• The words "payment reminder" (or equivalent) and a reference number
• Original invoice number, invoice date, and due date
• Amount outstanding (and any partial payments already received)
• A new, explicit payment deadline
• Your bank account details or a payment link
• What happens if payment is not made by that date

What to leave out:

• Emotional language ("We are disappointed to note...")
• Vague threats ("Further steps will be taken...")
• Long explanations of your payment terms that the customer already agreed to

Keep the body of a first reminder under 150 words. Customers do not read long emails. They scan for the number and the deadline.

Factuur Herinnering Voorbeeld: A Template You Can Use

Below are two templates: one for a first reminder and one for a second. Copy, adapt the fields in brackets, and you are done.

First Payment Reminder (Day 7–14 After Due Date)

Subject: Payment Reminder – Invoice [INVOICE NUMBER] – [YOUR COMPANY NAME]

Dear [Customer Name],

This is a friendly reminder that invoice [INVOICE NUMBER], dated [INVOICE DATE], for the amount of €[AMOUNT] was due on [DUE DATE].

If you have already arranged payment, please disregard this message.

If not, we would ask you to settle the outstanding amount by [NEW DEADLINE, e.g., 7 days from today]. Payment details are as follows:

• IBAN: [YOUR IBAN]
• Reference: [INVOICE NUMBER]

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Kind regards, [YOUR NAME] [YOUR COMPANY] [CONTACT DETAILS]

Second Payment Reminder (Day 14 After First Reminder)

Subject: Second Payment Reminder – Invoice [INVOICE NUMBER] – Action Required

Dear [Customer Name],

We have not yet received payment for invoice [INVOICE NUMBER], dated [INVOICE DATE], for €[AMOUNT], which was due on [DUE DATE]. We sent an initial reminder on [DATE OF FIRST REMINDER].

We ask you to arrange payment by [NEW DEADLINE]. If we do not receive payment by that date, we will be required to [charge statutory late-payment interest / refer the matter to a collection agency / place your account on credit hold].

If there is an issue with the invoice or you would like to discuss a payment arrangement, please contact us directly at [PHONE/EMAIL].

Kind regards, [YOUR NAME] [YOUR COMPANY] [CONTACT DETAILS]

These templates deliberately say nothing warm or performative. No "we value your business" at the top. The recipient knows you want your money; saying so clearly is more respectful of their time than dressing it up.

Keeping the Tone Right

First reminders should sound like a colleague flagging a missed task. Second reminders should sound like a manager noting a missed deadline. Final notices should sound like a contract being enforced. That progression is what keeps relationships intact while still moving the process forward.

A few specific rules:

Avoid "unfortunately." Phrases like "We regret to inform you" add length and signal discomfort that the customer does not need to see. State the fact directly.

Name the consequence specifically. "Further steps may be taken" is meaningless. "Statutory late-payment interest at 8% above base rate will apply from [DATE]" is actionable. Under EU Directive 2011/7/EU on late payments, B2B creditors in EU member states are entitled to statutory interest and a minimum flat-fee recovery cost of €40 when invoices are overdue. Stating this is not aggressive; it is accurate.

Do not apologise for sending the reminder. "We are sorry to bother you" is a tic that undermines you. The customer owes you money. You are allowed to ask for it.

Be specific about deadlines. "Please pay promptly" means nothing. "Please pay by 15 January" is a commitment the customer can either meet or miss.

A Real Example from ERP Operations

Here is a situation I have seen in distribution environments more than once. A company runs AFAS for its ERP and finance, with around 600 active trade accounts. Their accounts receivable team was manually monitoring aging reports every Monday, copying invoice details into email drafts, and sending reminders by hand. At 600 accounts, that was roughly 4 to 6 hours of work each week just for first reminders, more when second and third contacts were factored in.

The error rate was also real. Invoice numbers were occasionally transposed. The wrong amount showed up because someone referenced an old report. One customer was chased for an invoice they had paid, because the payment hadn't been entered yet when the aging report ran on Monday morning. That kind of error costs more than the time to fix it. It costs trust.

Automating the reminder sequence cut that manual time to under an hour and dropped the error rate to near zero, because the reminder pulled invoice data directly from the system rather than a copied spreadsheet. Days Sales Outstanding dropped by about 8 days over the following quarter. The team spent the recovered time on the genuinely complex cases: disputed invoices, payment plans, customers in difficulty.

This is the same dynamic described in AI order management: removing the manual handoff step between systems eliminates both the lag and the transcription errors. The same principle applies here.

Automating Payment Reminders

If you have more than 50 active debtors, manual reminders will sooner or later fall through the cracks. Most ERP systems handle this natively. Exact, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and Odoo all have built-in dunning modules that let you define a reminder schedule, write template text, and trigger sends automatically based on due-date logic.

What the automation needs to do well:

• Pull live invoice data, not a daily export. If a customer pays at 9 a.m., the system should not send a reminder at 10 a.m.
• Respect manual overrides. When a customer has called to arrange a payment plan, that account needs to be excluded from the automatic run. No system handles this without human input.
• Log every communication. When a dispute reaches a lawyer or a collection agency, you need a record of every reminder sent, on what date, and to which email address.
• Handle partial payments correctly. A reminder for €10,000 when €7,000 has already arrived damages the relationship immediately.

The wider context here is process automation: automating reminders is one piece of a larger accounts-receivable workflow, and it only works cleanly when the upstream data (payments received, invoice status) is accurate and timely. Garbage in, angry customers out.

A study by the Institute of Finance and Management found that companies using automated AR processes reduce their Days Sales Outstanding by an average of 15 to 20%. That is a meaningful cash-flow improvement for any business running on 30 to 60 day terms.

For businesses whose sales orders come in via email or PDF, there is also a compounding problem: if orders are entered late, invoices go out late, and the whole collection cycle shifts right. Tools that convert email and PDF orders automatically into ERP entries help fix the upstream problem so that invoice dates and due dates are accurate from the start.

The Outcome of Getting This Right

Late payments are not primarily a legal problem. They are a process problem. Customers pay on time when the invoice is correct, when the due date is clear, and when they hear from you promptly if they miss it.

The companies that collect fastest are not the ones with the most aggressive templates. They are the ones who send accurate reminders, on a consistent schedule, with the right amount of information and no more. That is a system problem, and it has a system solution. Build the sequence, automate what can be automated, and keep the human judgment for the cases that actually need it.