Payment reminders · before collections
Call every overdue invoice
before it becomes a case.
Between the due date and the collections handover, a phone call still works — and almost nobody makes it. Sono calls every overdue account inside that window, clears whatever is blocking payment, and secures a date the customer commits to.
Measured across Sono's 2026 European consumer-credit calling programme. Recovery rates vary by portfolio — the calculator below lets you set your own.
A payment reminder call is an outbound call made after an invoice falls overdue but before the account is escalated to collections. Sono places those calls across the whole overdue ledger: it confirms the customer knows what is outstanding, clears whatever is blocking payment, and agrees a date they commit to — while the account is still yours and no collection fees have been added.
The problem
The reminder window
is nobody's job.
Dunning software sends the letters. Collections picks the file up at day 60. In between lie thirty to sixty days in which the one thing that reliably moves an invoice — a conversation — never happens, because no team is sized to have it.
The cost of that gap is not the invoice. It is what the invoice turns into: a collections case that carries a commission, a customer who now deals with an agency instead of you, and a receivable that has aged past the point where most of it comes back.
Chasing late payments already costs European businesses 275 billion euros and 74 working days a year — about 9,194€ per company (Intrum, European Payment Report 2025). Most of that is spent after the window has already closed.
The cost of waiting
Cost to win one payment commitment, by days past due
The same conversation costs 2.4× more to win at day 65 than at day 3 — and returns a commitment less than half as often. Speed is the cheapest lever in receivables, and it is the one nobody has the headcount to pull.
Sono · payment reminder calls
Every day you wait, the book pays back less.
Recovery on an overdue account decays fastest in the first ten days. Set your book below to see what your current time to first contact costs you every year.
Left on the table each year
Recovered per € spent on calls
Calling at day 3, on your numbers
Kept out of collections / year
Accounts that settle before handover
Recovery against days past due
Moving first contact from day 30 to day 3 is worth +14.95 € on every overdue account — before any change to your dunning letters, your terms or your team.
If you called them with people
With Sono
Answer rate, commitment rate, cost per commitment and the 70% commitment-to-payment rate are measured on Sono's 2026 European consumer-credit calling programme. Applied to your inputs they are a model, not a guarantee for a different portfolio. Agent-team figures assume two 4-minute attempts per account at 83% occupancy, on Eurostat 2025 labour cost for administrative and support activities.
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How it works
From overdue ledger to payment date
Sono reads your ledger, calls on the cadence you set, and writes every outcome back where your team already works.
Step 01
Reads the overdue ledger
Connects to your billing, ERP or AR platform — or a scheduled file — and picks up every account the moment it ages past your trigger.
Step 02
Calls inside the window
A short, polite call on the cadence you configure — day 3, day 10, day 25, whatever your terms allow. Retries at different hours until it reaches a person.
Step 03
Clears the blocker
Resends the invoice, corrects the reference, confirms the amount, or takes a dispute off the table — then agrees a date the customer commits to.
Step 04
Writes it all back
Confirmation SMS to the customer; disposition, promised date and transcript to your system. Only the accounts that genuinely need escalation reach collections.
Compare
Three ways to work
the reminder window
Almost every receivables function does one of these three things between the due date and the collections handover.
| Dunning letters & email | In-house calling team | Sono | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What reaches the customer | A message they can ignore without consequence | A conversation — for the few accounts that get one | A conversation on every account in the book |
| Coverage | The whole book, but only on paper | Whatever the roster has hours for — usually the largest balances | Every overdue account, regardless of balance |
| Time to first conversation | Never | Days to weeks, once the escalation list is worked | Day 3, on your cadence |
| Disputes surfaced | Only when the customer bothers to reply | Yes, on the accounts that get called | On every account, at day 3 instead of day 60 |
| Cost behaviour | Near zero, and returns to match | Scales with headcount, paid whether or not the account pays | Flat monthly fee plus usage; does not scale with volume |
Letters are cheap because nobody reads them. A calling team works, but only on the slice of the book it has hours for. Sono is the only one of the three that puts a conversation on every account, on day three.
What you get
Sono Reminders
in practice
Sono works the whole overdue ledger from day three. No prioritisation by balance, no backlog, no account that never got called because the week ran out.
An account settled at day three never meets an agency, never carries a collection fee, and never becomes the conversation that ends a customer relationship. Retention is the part of recovery nobody puts on the invoice.
Commitments secured on Sono's calls averaged 14.1 days — 23 days sooner than the longest term the agent was allowed to offer. Cash that arrives three weeks earlier is cash you can redeploy.
A wrong reference, a duplicated line, a service the customer says was never delivered — Sono finds these at day three and routes them to your billing team, instead of letting them ripen into a contested collections file.
Sono identifies as an AI assistant, honours calling-hour rules and do-not-call flags, follows your disclosure wording, and stores a transcript and recording of every call against the account.
When a reminder isn't enough
Some accounts will still
reach collections.
Reminders keep most of the book out of the escalation path, but not all of it. For the files that do get handed over — and for the agencies that work them before a case reaches court — Sono runs the same voice engine against a very different objective.
FAQ
Frequently asked
questions
A payment reminder call is an outbound call placed after an invoice passes its due date but before the account is handed to collections. It confirms the customer knows the balance is outstanding, resolves whatever is blocking payment, and agrees a date the customer commits to — while the relationship is still intact and no collection fees have been added.
Timing and intent. Payment reminders run in the pre-collection window — typically days 1 to 60 past due — and aim to keep the account out of collections entirely. Collection calls work files that have already been escalated, usually by an agency, and aim to recover from a relationship that has already broken down. Same voice technology, opposite objective.
Most overdue invoices in a healthy book are oversights, not refusals — a missed email, a changed bank card, an invoice stuck in someone's approval queue. A short, polite call at day 3 reads as a service, not as pressure. Sono identifies itself as an AI assistant, never argues, and hands anyone who disputes the balance or reports hardship straight to a person.
As early as your terms allow. In Sono's measured collections data, 32.5% of borrowers reached at 3 days past due committed to a payment date, against 11.7% at 65 days — and each commitment cost 2.08€ to win at day 3 versus 5.02€ at day 65. The first ten days are where recovery decays fastest, and they are the days in-house teams almost never fully cover.
Yes. Sono reads the overdue ledger from your billing, ERP or accounts-receivable platform over API or webhooks — or from a scheduled CSV — and writes back every outcome: contacted, promised-to-pay with a date, disputed, wrong number, hardship. Most teams are live within days.
Sono stops asking for payment. It captures what the customer is disputing, logs it against the account, and routes the case to your credit or billing team instead of pushing for a commitment. Disputes that surface at day 3 are far cheaper to resolve than the same dispute surfacing at day 60 through a collections agency.
Sono identifies itself as an AI voice assistant on every call, observes calling-time restrictions and do-not-call flags, follows your scripts and disclosure wording, and retains a transcript and recording of every conversation for audit. Because reminder calls happen before formal collection proceedings, they sit under your normal customer-communication policy rather than under debt-collection statute — but Sono is built to satisfy both.
Get started
Close the gap between due and overdue
In a 30-minute demo, hear Sono make reminder calls on a slice of your own overdue ledger — on your cadence, with your wording and your escalation rules.
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