ArticleApr 2026
Your dunning emails are too polite (and too rude)
Tone-matched collections: what 30% more recovered cash actually looks like.
Anubhav Dubey · Founder, Verlix5 min
Most dunning sequences have one voice. It is either apologetic for six weeks or aggressive from day one, and both leave money on the table.
Lateness and size are different signals
A $2,000 invoice three days late is almost always an administrative miss. A $40,000 invoice forty days late is a decision someone has made. Sending the same email to both is what produces the two familiar failures: annoying good customers, and being ignored by the ones who are stalling.
Tone should track the evidence, not the calendar alone.
What a matched sequence looks like
- Day 1, a genuine reminder, assuming the miss was accidental
- Day 7, a second notice with the invoice restated and payment links surfaced
- Day 21, escalation, a named contact and a call task raised
- Day 45, human handoff, with the full history attached
Recovery went up 30% the month this went live, and the increase came almost entirely from the middle of the sequence, the accounts that were neither forgetful nor unwilling, just unprompted.
Close the month on the first.
Free up to $1M ARR. Ninety seconds to your first invoice.