Help

Chasing overdue dues

Every organization has a handful of members who forget. Chasing them is nobody favourite job, so Sembr does it.

The schedule

Three notices, at 1, 7 and 14 days past due.

That is the whole cadence. It is not configurable today, and we would rather tell you that than imply a settings screen exists.

What each one sounds like

Day 1 assumes an oversight, because it almost always is. The invoice and a link to pay it. Nothing about consequences.

Day 7 is direct and still friendly. The amount, how many days it has been, the link. No shame and no threat, and it offers a human: replying to the email reaches your organization.

Day 14 is plain and serious. It states the actual consequence once, as a fact, without dramatising it. No red, no capitals, no countdown.

Who it comes from

Your organization. Not Sembr.

The member sees your name, and replies reach you. A member should be able to read every email their organization sends and never once wonder who Sembr is. We are the plumbing.

It will not chase somebody twice

If a payment is in flight right now, that member is not chased today, whatever it settles to.

And if the nightly run misses a day, because of an outage or a restart, an invoice that is now nine days overdue gets the day-seven notice rather than nothing. It reaches the stage it has actually earned, instead of falling through a gap.

It will not chase somebody it must not

A member who has unsubscribed, bounced, or complained is suppressed, and a suppressed address does not receive a dunning notice. That is recorded rather than silently skipped, so you can see who was not chased and why.

Stopping it

Any of these ends the chasing for that invoice, immediately:

  • the member pays it
  • you record a payment that arrived some other way
  • you void it
  • you write it off

There is no separate "stop chasing" switch, on purpose. A switch like that becomes a list of invoices somebody muted and nobody ever looked at again. Resolve the invoice and the chasing resolves with it.

What happens after day 14

Nothing automatic beyond the invoice moving through its own states. Sembr will not cancel a membership on its own. Lapsing is about what is owed, and even a lapsed member keeps their portal, directory and community access. See statuses, lapsing and reinstatement.

Next: autopay.

The members who set it up never appear here again.