Reminders, follow-ups and status emails

Getting paid is mostly a matter of asking again — and asking again is the first thing a busy workshop stops doing. OrderDen does it for you, in your words, at the hour you choose, and stops the moment it should.

Three things live here:

• Payment reminders chase an unpaid invoice, before and after its due date.
• Quote follow-ups nudge a client who has not answered.
• Order status emails tell your customer their order is confirmed, on its way, or delivered.

All three go out as email templates you can edit, and all three respect a pause switch — on the whole workspace, or on one document.

Payment reminders

Company Settings → Reminders holds the schedule. Out of the box it is the one most small workshops describe when you ask how they chase:

Change any step's day, switch one off, remove it, or add your own. Each step picks which template it sends, so the fourteen-day letter can read differently from the three-day one.

When they actually go

• Send at is an hour in your workspace's timezone (Company Settings → Profile). Nine in the morning in Auckland is nine in the morning in Auckland.
• Skip weekends rolls a Saturday or Sunday send forward to the Monday. Nobody wants Saturday's post on Saturday.
• If several steps have gone by — the schedule was changed, or the invoice is a month late — only the latest one is sent. Your client gets one email saying the invoice is a month overdue, not three saying three, seven and fourteen days.

When they stop

Chasing stops by itself the moment it should: when the invoice is paid, credited to zero, written off or voided. It never sends twice for the same step, however many times the background worker runs.

Quote follow-ups

Counted from the day the quote was raised: a nudge at three days and once more at seven, by default. Following up stops when the client accepts or declines, and when the quote passes its valid-until date — an expired quote has been answered by the calendar.

Pausing

There are three switches, and they mean different things.

• On one document. The Pause button on an invoice or a quote, under Sharing. For the client who has promised a cheque, or the one you would rather telephone. Everything else keeps being chased.
• On one client. Automatic messages on the client record — No automatic payment reminders and No automatic quote follow-ups, each on its own. For the client who asked not to be chased at all: it covers every invoice or quote they have and every one they ever will, so nobody has to pause each document by hand and eventually forget one. The document card says so when this is what is stopping it, because resuming that one document would not start it chasing.
• On the whole workspace. Pause all automatic chasing in Company Settings → Reminders. Nothing goes out to any client until you switch it back off. Your own daily summary still arrives.

Send now sits beside the pause switch and does what it says — immediately, whatever the schedule says and whether or not the document, the client or the workspace is paused. None of the three is a block on you; they stop the schedule, not the person. It is recorded separately, so pressing it in the morning does not silence the reminder the schedule owed that afternoon.

Under both buttons, Already sent lists every reminder that has gone on this document: which step, to whom, and when. A reminder that failed to send shows there too, with the reason.

Overdue invoices

An invoice that is issued, unsettled and past its due date becomes Overdue each night. It is not a status you set — it is worked out from the date, in your workspace's timezone, so an invoice due today is not overdue in Auckland merely because it is already tomorrow in London.

Overdue shows up in three places:

• the Overdue filter and the Age column on the invoice list;
• the AR ageing report (Reports → AR ageing), which is who owes what and for how long, bucketed current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90+ days;
• the Overdue by age dashboard widget, which is the top of that report.

Push a due date out and the invoice goes back to Sent on the next pass. Record a payment and it moves on to Partially paid or Paid, like any other.

Order status emails

Under Company Settings → Reminders, three switches decide what your customer hears as their order moves (the shipped switch covers collections too):

• Order confirmed — off by default; plenty of workshops confirm by telephone.
• Order shipped — on by default, with the carrier and tracking numbers. This is the one every buyer expects. It goes out the moment a label is bought, or when you record a shipment by hand.
• Ready for collection — the same switch. An order set aside for pickup gets "it's ready" rather than "it's on its way", with the date it can be collected from.
• Order delivered — off by default. Sent when the carrier says the parcel arrived, which OrderDen knows because every label it buys is tracked.

Email templates

Company Settings → Email templates is what every one of these letters actually says — quotes, invoices, each reminder step, receipts, the four order status emails, and the plain share-link note.

Each starts on a sensible default. Change a word and it becomes yours; the list badges it Edited, and Reset to the built-in wording puts the default back.

Variables

Drop a variable in with the chips under the box and it is filled in when the email goes out:

A variable the document does not have renders as nothing, so a sentence never arrives with braces in it. There is no other language in a template — no conditionals, no arithmetic — deliberately.

The body understands a little Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [links](https://…) and - bullets.

Signature and blind copies

Two settings in Company Settings → Email delivery apply to every templated email:

• Signature is what {{org.signature}} becomes.
• Blind-copy every email to takes a silent copy of everything that goes out, so you keep your own record without the client seeing it. A single template can add a second blind copy of its own.

Send yourself one

Send test sends a specimen through whichever mail route your workspace uses, filled in with a sample client and invoice — never a real one, so a test can never quote a real client's balance to whoever pressed the button. It tests the text in the box, not the last thing you saved.

Notifications: the bell, and the daily summary

The bell in the header is what happened while you were doing something else: a quote accepted or declined, a payment received, an invoice going overdue, a shipment delivered. Clicking one takes you to the record and marks it read; Mark all read clears the badge.

Personal Settings → Notifications decides what reaches you — in the app, by email, or both, per kind. Your choices are yours: turning something off does not turn it off for anybody else in the workspace.

The daily summary is one email each morning with everything that needs you today: quotes awaiting an answer, invoices due today, invoices overdue, orders promised this week, stock at its reorder point, and batches ready to come off the curing rack. Nothing is sent on a quiet day. Its hour is set with the rest of the schedule in Company Settings → Reminders, and whether you receive it is in your own notification settings.

Where the mail comes from

Reminders go out the same way a document you send by hand does: through your own SMTP server once it is saved and verified (Company Settings → Email delivery), and through OrderDen's relay otherwise. Nothing is sent at all from a server with neither, and a reminder that could not be sent says so in the document's history rather than disappearing.

Through the API

• GET/PUT /api/v1/settings/reminders — the schedule.
• GET /api/v1/email-templates, GET/PUT/DELETE /api/v1/email-templates/{key} and POST /api/v1/email-templates/{key}/test.
• GET/PUT /api/v1/invoices/{id}/reminders and POST .../reminders/send; GET/PUT /api/v1/quotes/{id}/follow-ups and POST .../follow-ups/send.
• GET /api/v1/notifications?userId=… and PUT /api/v1/notifications/{id}/read.
• GET /api/v1/reports/ar-ageing.

The other letters that send themselves

Beyond the reminder schedule, four emails go out on their own and each is a template you can rewrite in Company Settings → Email templates:

• Late fee added — when the nightly pass adds one to an overdue invoice, so the first the client hears of it is not the next statement.
• Automatic payment taken — the receipt for a charge against a card on file.
• Automatic payment failed — sent once, on the first decline. A client emailed on every rung of the retry ladder learns to ignore the email.
• Your bank needs you to confirm — when a charge needs the cardholder to approve it themselves (3-D Secure), with the link to do it.

See Recurring invoices, cards on file and late fees.