Auto-chasers for overdue invoices

Chasing payment is the least enjoyable part of locum admin, especially across a portfolio of workplaces and agencies that all pay on different timelines. Auto-chasers handle the polite follow-up for you. When an AUD invoice you have sent to a workplace passes its due date, Sessional watches it and emails a short, professional reminder at set points so you are not manually nudging accounts payable yourself.

The chase email goes to the workplace contact, not to you. It reads as a reminder from you (your name, your invoice number, your bank details), with Sessional simply doing the sending. Your own address is set as the reply-to, so if the workplace replies, the conversation lands in your inbox.

Sessional runs an automated check every hour. Once an invoice is past its due date, that check first moves it to an OVERDUE status on your dashboard. From there, the auto-chaser looks for three moments measured from the original due date:

• Day 14 past due: the first reminder, with the invoice PDF attached
• Day 21 past due: a second reminder if it is still unpaid
• Day 28 past due: a third and final automated reminder

After day 28 the automation stops. Anything still outstanding from that point is yours to handle: you can send a manual chase from the invoice, pick up the phone, or escalate however you prefer. Because the check runs hourly with a small safety window around each threshold, a reminder still fires reliably even if one hourly run is missed, rather than silently skipping a day.

Each automated reminder attaches the original, timestamped invoice PDF, the exact document you first issued, not a freshly regenerated one. That matters for two reasons. The workplace gets the same file it was already sent, so there is no confusion about amounts or invoice numbers. And the attachment preserves the issue date and the figures as they stood when you raised it, which keeps your records clean for GST and BAS purposes.

The reminder email itself includes:

• Your name and the invoice number, so it is unmistakable which invoice is outstanding
• The total amount in AUD and how many days past due it is
• Your bank details (BSB and account), if you have saved them on your billing profile
• The original invoice PDF as an attachment

The workplace can also use the same secure link from the original invoice email to view the invoice, mark it paid, or raise a dispute without needing an account. See workplace access for how those no-login links work.

Auto-chasers are deliberately restrained. Two safeguards stop a workplace ever being pestered.

A 72-hour cooldown per invoice. Once any reminder goes out for an invoice, whether automated or one you sent yourself, no further chase can fire on that same invoice for 72 hours. This is enforced with an atomic check at send time, so even if the hourly job runs more than once or you click a manual chase on the same day, only one email actually goes out. If sending the PDF or the email fails, the cooldown is rolled back so the next threshold is not quietly burned.

Grouped per locum. Reminders and the related overdue notice are organised around you rather than fired blindly per invoice. If several invoices tip overdue on the same day, the overdue alert to you arrives as a single digest rather than a flood of separate emails, one row per workplace.

Automatic chasing is a paid feature, included on the Plus and Pro plans. On the Free plan you can still create and send invoices and watch them move to OVERDUE, but the hourly job will not send automated reminders for your account, it skips Free-tier invoices. You can always send a manual chase from any invoice yourself, on any plan.

If you later downgrade to Free, automated chasing stops at the next threshold. See billing and subscription for what each tier includes and agency versus direct billing for when raising your own invoice (and therefore chasing it) applies.

Auto-chasers are governed by a single notification preference. To switch them off, go to your notification preferences and toggle off the automatic invoice chaser option. With it off, the hourly check still tracks your invoices and still moves overdue ones to OVERDUE on your dashboard, but no automated reminder is emailed to any workplace.

The preference is account-wide: there is no per-invoice switch today. If you want one specific invoice chased and the rest left alone, turn the automation off and send the manual chase on that one invoice yourself. Manual chases also let you add a short custom note, which the automated template does not.