Dunning / Reminder Sequencer

The problem this kills

Chasing overdue invoices is death by a thousand emails. You open the aging report, scan for who's late, try to remember whether you already nudged this customer last week, dig up their email, decide whether this one gets the gentle "just a friendly reminder" or the "this is now seriously past due" version, copy a template, swap in the invoice number and amount, and hit send. Then you do it forty more times. By Thursday you've lost track of who's at which stage, you've accidentally sent a stern final notice to a customer who already promised to pay Friday, and a genuinely overdue account slipped through because you ran out of afternoon.

Most AR desks run this entirely on memory and a color-coded spreadsheet. The result is uneven: some customers get over-emailed and annoyed, some get nothing for two months, disputed invoices get dunned anyway (which makes you look disorganized), and when a manager asks "what have we actually sent this customer?" the answer lives in someone's sent folder.

This tool turns that ritual into a clean, repeatable, approve-then-send process - so the right reminder goes to the right customer at the right stage, nobody gets over-chased, and there's a complete record of every message.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Imports your open invoices from a CSV (invoice #, customer, email, amount, due date, balance).
• Figures out how overdue each invoice is and picks the correct reminder stage - friendly → firm → final notice - based on your own day-past-due rules.
• Drafts a personalized email for each one, in your wording and tone, with the invoice number, amount, due date, and a statement or invoice link.
• Builds the day's reminders into a single batch and shows it to you in one review screen - who's getting which stage and the exact text.
• Sends every approved reminder through Resend - and only after you click approve.
• Respects a per-customer cooldown so nobody gets emailed twice in a few days, and skips disputed and promised-to-pay accounts and anyone on your suppression list.
• Dedupes on invoice + stage so the same reminder can never go out twice.
• Logs every send and reply, and exports an activity report of all dunning sent over any date range.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how you chase invoices today, what accounting system your AR lives in, the real column names in your export, how many reminder stages you use and at how many days past due each one fires, your exact wording and tone per stage, your cooldown and "stop after N reminders" rules, and your messiest edge cases - disputed invoices, payment plans, customers in collections, multiple open invoices for one customer. It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your collections process, not a generic template you have to wrestle into place.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model and your stage rules.
• The full build: database, login, CSV import with duplicate guards, the stage-selection engine, the email drafting, the batch review-and-approve screen, the Resend send, and reply logging.
• The hard human approval gate, the per-customer cooldown, the suppression list, and the disputed / promised-to-pay skips.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so the tool is fully usable today even before you connect it to your accounting system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a finance team actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only ever see the invoices, customers, and reminders that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every draft, approval, send, skip, and reply logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI drafts the day's reminders, but a real person reviews the whole batch and approves; nothing is ever emailed automatically.
• A per-customer cooldown and suppression list so no one gets over-chased, and disputed / promised-to-pay accounts are skipped on purpose.
• Duplicate guards - dedupe on invoice + stage so the identical reminder can never be sent twice.

Who it's for

AR clerks, billing specialists, office managers, and ops/BPM folks who hand-email payment reminders one customer at a time and want a real, auditable collections cadence without hiring a developer or buying a heavyweight collections platform. You don't need to write code. You need your open-invoices CSV, your reminder wording, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.