Does 17hats Send Automatic Payment Reminders to Clients?

You sent the invoice three weeks ago. The project wrapped well, the client seemed happy, and since then there has been nothing at all. 17hats is already carrying so much of your business — the quotes, the contracts, the workflows that fire on their own — that it feels reasonable to assume it is quietly handling this part too.

Whether it is or not changes what you do next. If 17hats has been sending reminders all along, emailing the client yourself means doubling up and looking a little disorganized. If it has been sending nothing, then this invoice has sat in complete silence for three weeks, and none of that silence had to happen.

So here is the direct answer, along with everything that decides whether those reminders actually land: where the settings live, what the defaults really do, the two conditions that switch reminders off without telling you, and the part of the follow-up that still comes back to you.

The Short Answer: Yes, With Conditions

Yes. 17hats has a built-in automatic email reminder system, and invoices are covered by it. The reminders are configured once at the account level rather than invoice by invoice, which means that after a single setup they apply to everything you send afterward.

17hats explains in its help documentation on document email reminders that the platform automates reminders for upcoming and past-due documents — quotes, contracts, questionnaires, and invoices — and notes that because this is handled automatically, you do not need to build reminder steps into your Workflows.

The "with conditions" half is where most of the real confusion starts. The reminders are genuinely automatic, but they only fire when a particular set of circumstances line up. Miss one and the system simply stays quiet. It does not flag the problem, and it does not tell you an email was skipped.

One more thing worth checking before anything else: 17hats notes that this feature may not be available on all plan types. If the Reminders tab looks thin or missing, your plan is the first place to look.

Where the Reminder Settings Actually Live

You will find them in your Account Settings, under Email Settings, on the Reminders tab. That single screen controls reminders for every document type, so you turn them on per type rather than per client or per invoice.

If you have been with 17hats for a long time, the location may be the reason you have not found them. Document and email reminders were released in 2018, and before that, invoice reminders lived in the Invoice Options tab. 17hats also notes that accounts created before June 2018 had reminders switched on automatically — which means some long-time users have had reminders running for years without ever visiting the settings.

For invoices specifically, there are three switches rather than two. Upcoming reminders go out a set number of days before the due date. Past due reminders go out a set number of days after it. The third, Upcoming and Past Due, applies only to invoices with a payment schedule, and only when one payment is already late while another is coming due.

Each reminder has its own editable subject line and message body, and you can drop tokens into the text so the email pulls in details from the specific document.

What the Default Schedule Really Does

This is the part most people are surprised by, because the defaults are gentler than the mental picture of "automatic reminders" suggests.

By default, an upcoming reminder goes out one day before the payment is due. The past due reminder goes out one day after the due date, and then repeats monthly, stopping after it has been sent twelve times. Reminder emails go out daily at 10am in your account's time zone, and each one carries a link the client can use to view and pay the invoice online.

Read that cadence again, because it has a real consequence. An invoice goes past due. The client gets one nudge the next morning. Then nothing for thirty days. In a month of silence, an invoice that was simply forgotten has plenty of time to become an invoice that feels awkward to bring up.

That gap matters more than it used to. Intuit's 2026 Small Business Late Payments Report found that nearly three in five small businesses are carrying invoices overdue by 30 days or more, up sharply from the year before. On a monthly repeat, an invoice that reaches the 30-day mark has been followed up on exactly once.

The fix is straightforward: open the past due reminder and change the repeat from monthly to weekly. Nothing else about the setup needs to change, and it turns one nudge a month into four.

The Two Conditions That Quietly Switch Reminders Off

When someone says their 17hats reminders are not sending, it is almost always one of two things — and neither of them produces an error message.

The first is a missing due date. 17hats names this directly as the most common cause of a document reminder not going out. The whole reminder system is built around counting days before and after a due date, so a document without one has nothing to count from. It sits there looking perfectly normal and generates nothing.

The second is project status. Reminder emails only send for documents attached to an active project. If a project was marked complete or archived when the work finished — which is the natural thing to do when the work is, in fact, finished — the invoice attached to it stops generating reminders even though it is still unpaid. Keeping the project open until the money arrives is the habit that prevents this.

Working the other way, reminders stop on their own once the document is completed or the invoice is paid in full, which is exactly what you want. Nobody gets chased for money they already sent.

What 17hats Reminders Do Not Do

Knowing the edges of the system is what keeps you from assuming a client has been contacted when they have not.

• They are email only. There is no text message option, so a client who has stopped opening email is effectively unreachable through this system.
• Everyone gets the same message. You can edit the template and use tokens, but the tone that goes to your most reliable client is the same tone that goes to the one who is always ninety days behind.
• They only cover invoices created inside 17hats. If you bill certain clients through a different tool, or send the occasional invoice manually, none of those are touched by this system.
• On a combined document — a quote, contract, and invoice sent together — the reminder links the client back to the full set rather than straight to the invoice, which adds a step between the reminder and the payment.

None of this makes 17hats a poor choice. It is the same shape of trade-off you will find in comparable all-in-one platforms; the specifics differ, but the pattern holds. It is worth comparing against how HoneyBook handles automatic payment reminders and how Dubsado approaches the same problem if you are still deciding which platform to build your process around.

Building a Follow-Up Rhythm That Actually Holds

A handful of changes turn the default setup into something you can rely on.

• Turn on both upcoming and past due reminders rather than only the past due one. A note before the due date often prevents lateness entirely.
• Change the past due repeat from monthly to weekly, so a forgotten invoice gets four touches in a month instead of one.
• Set a due date on every single invoice, without exception. This is the single change that prevents the most silent failures.
• Keep the project active until the invoice is paid, not until the work is delivered.
• Check that your plan actually includes reminders before you rely on them.

Then decide where the automatic layer ends and you begin. Automation is very good at the polite, predictable nudges nobody enjoys writing — the day-before note, the weekly check-in. It is less good at the moment a payment is genuinely overdue and the relationship needs a real human sentence. Plan for one personal message somewhere around the thirty-day mark, and let the system carry everything before it.

If your invoices live in more than one place — some in 17hats, a few in a spreadsheet, one client billed through something else entirely — a dedicated reminder layer such as DueDrop can sit across all of them and keep the follow-up consistent no matter where the invoice was originally created.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does 17hats send payment reminders automatically?

Yes. 17hats includes automatic email reminders for invoices, set up once in Account Settings under Email Settings on the Reminders tab. You can enable reminders before the due date, after it, or both, and the system sends them without any further action from you.

Why are my 17hats invoice reminders not sending?

The most common cause is a missing due date — 17hats needs one to calculate when a reminder should go out. The next most common is a project that is no longer active, since reminders only send for documents on active projects. After that, check that the reminder type is actually switched on and that your plan includes the feature.

How often does 17hats send past due reminders?

By default, the first past due reminder goes out one day after the due date, then repeats monthly and stops after twelve sends. You can change both the timing and the repeat interval, and setting it to weekly gives a noticeably tighter follow-up rhythm.

Can I change the wording of 17hats reminder emails?

Yes. Each reminder has an editable subject line and message body, and you can insert tokens that pull details from the document. These templates can be edited in Account Settings or in the Documents and Emails templates tab. One detail catches people out: only templates saved with the matching "due_send" type are used by the automatic reminder system, so a duplicate you created separately will not be the one that sends.

Does 17hats send reminders by text message?

No. Reminders are email only. If a client has stopped responding to email, you will need to reach them some other way yourself.

The Takeaway

• 17hats does send automatic invoice reminders, configured once at the account level rather than per invoice.
• The defaults are gentle — one day before due, one day after, then monthly — so switching the past due repeat to weekly is usually the highest-value change you can make.
• A missing due date or an inactive project will silently stop reminders, with no error and no warning.
• Reminders are email only, use one template for every client, and cover only the invoices you create inside 17hats.
• Let the system handle the predictable nudges, and save your own words for the moment a payment is genuinely overdue.