To chase an unpaid invoice by email, quote its reference, amount and due date, ask for the payment date and offer to resend it. A Muzau agent follows up this way from your invoice Google Sheet or from the invoice email sent from your inbox, a notch firmer from the second reminder, without threats. It stops when the invoice is marked as paid or the client replies. While approval is on, you read each reminder before it goes out.
A late invoice is rarely a refusal. The email reached someone who does not pay invoices, the payment is waiting for an internal signature, or the invoice slipped under other messages.
What takes time is the follow-up: knowing which invoices are past due, checking they have not already been paid, then writing the second reminder without upsetting the client. Your team keeps the relationship and the decision to go further; the agent takes on tracking due dates and writing the reminders.
In Muzau's Workshop, you create an invoice reminder agent. It starts from a Google Sheet, or a CSV or Excel file, where each invoice has its own row and due date. It follows up once the due date has passed, or earlier if you ask. A connected Google Sheet is reread before each run of the agent; an uploaded file does not update itself. See chasing unpaid invoices from Google Sheets.
If your invoices go out from Gmail, Outlook or another inbox, the Muzau agent can track the invoice email. Put its address in copy, or let it reread your Sent folder according to a rule you set, for example a subject that contains “Invoice”. The reminder goes out in the same thread, from your inbox when it is connected, with the team member who sent the invoice in copy. This follow-up is counted from the send date, not the due date: D+3, D+7 and D+14 by default, a rhythm you set (the schedule for an invoice file is on when to chase an unpaid invoice). If a client has received two invoices by email, only the most recent one is chased.
The Muzau agent is set to quote the reference, amount and due date, ask for the payment date and offer to resend the invoice. With a spreadsheet, the amount quoted is the one on the row, never calculated. From the second reminder it is firmer, with no threat and no sales pitch, and it is instructed not to make anything up. These are instructions given to the AI, not wording guaranteed word for word: the “Email follow-ups” agent therefore submits each reminder for your approval first, in Management, under “To approve”. You send it, postpone it, edit the text or stop the follow-up.
The reminder stops when the invoice row shows it as paid (“Paid”, “Settled”, “Cleared”). With a connected invoicing tool, such as Pennylane, Sellsy, Axonaut or QuickBooks, the agent sees the invoice as paid and stops. It also stops as soon as the client replies, even from another address in the same thread, or when a team member writes to them from the connected inbox. An out-of-office message does not count. A client who replies STOP is not chased again. And cancelling the next reminder stops the follow-up for that client.
With or without a tool, a good invoice reminder reads in a few seconds and leaves only one thing to do: reply with a date.
A template, to adapt: “Hello, unless I am mistaken, invoice no. [reference] for [amount], due on [date], has not been paid yet. Could you tell me the expected payment date? I can resend it if needed.”
What to avoid: chasing an invoice that has already been paid because you did not check your receipts; writing again to a silent address without finding out who pays at the client; threatening from the first reminder; slipping a sales offer into a payment reminder. For the second and third reminders, see the tone of an invoice reminder.
Autonomous does not mean unchecked. You set the level of autonomy of every agent, its limits cannot be crossed, everything it does is recorded in a plain-language log, and one gesture stops it all.
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