Does FreeAgent Send Automatic Payment Reminders?

You sent the invoice weeks ago. The work was good, the client was happy, and the due date came and went without a word from either of you. Now you are sitting with the same question you have asked yourself a dozen times: do you nudge them again, or do you wait one more day and hope it lands on its own?

If you run your books in FreeAgent, there is a reasonable chance the software could have handled that nudge for you already — and an equally good chance it has been sitting switched off since the day you signed up. FreeAgent's reminder feature is genuinely useful, but it is not on by default, and it takes two separate steps to make it work.

This post covers what FreeAgent can and cannot do with automatic payment reminders: how to set a rule up, the checkbox most people forget on the invoice itself, the limits worth knowing, and a schedule that works for most small service businesses.

The Short Answer: Yes, But You Have to Switch Them On

FreeAgent does send automatic payment reminders. You can set them to go out before an invoice is due, after it becomes overdue, or both, and you can have them repeat at intervals until the invoice is paid. Reminders stop on their own the moment the invoice is marked as paid in full.

The catch is that none of this happens out of the box. Reminders in FreeAgent involve two pieces that live in different places:

An invoice reminder template, created once in your account settings, which defines the wording and the timing rule.
A per-invoice setting that tells FreeAgent to actually apply those rules to that particular invoice.

Set up the template but skip the second step and nothing sends. That single gap is the most common reason people conclude their reminders are broken when the feature is simply idle.

How FreeAgent's Reminder Rules Actually Work

Reminders in FreeAgent are built as email templates with timing rules attached. According to FreeAgent's own support documentation, each template carries a rule expressed as a number of days either before or after the invoice due date.

A few details shape how you should design your set:

You can create more than one reminder template, each with its own subject line, wording, and timing.
If you set a reminder to send after the due date, you can tick a recurring option so it repeats at that same interval until payment arrives.
If two templates with different wording are scheduled to land on the same day, FreeAgent sends only one of them. Space your rules out at different intervals.
The invoice is attached to every reminder as a PDF, so the client never has to dig for the original email.
You can include an online payment button in the reminder email, which removes a step for anyone paying by card.

You also control which address the reminder goes to using FreeAgent's email tags. The default sends to the contact's main email, but you can direct reminders to a billing address instead, or to both. On larger clients, where the person who hired you is not the person who pays you, that distinction matters more than the wording ever will.

Setting Up Your First Reminder Template

The setup lives in your account settings rather than anywhere near an individual invoice, which is part of why it goes unnoticed. The path is:

Open the drop-down menu under your business name and select Settings.
Choose Email Templates.
Select Add Invoice Reminder.
Under Invoice Reminder Rules, enter the number of days and choose whether it should send before or after the due date.
If it sends after the due date, decide whether to tick the recurring reminders option.
Write your subject line and message, then select Create Invoice Reminder.

The default sample text is fine, but it is worth rewriting in your own voice. A reminder that sounds like you wrote it reads as an ordinary business message. One that sounds like a system reads as the first step in something more formal, which is rarely the tone you want with a client you hope to work with again.

The Step Most People Miss

Creating the template is only half the job. Reminders apply per invoice, and the setting sits in the Emails section of the invoice form. When you create or edit a draft invoice, you need to tick the box labelled “Email payment reminders if the invoice goes unpaid”.

Two things are worth knowing here. First, if you set default email options on a contact, that checkbox is applied automatically for their invoices, which saves you remembering it every time. Second, reminders only send once an invoice has been emailed to the client or marked as Sent. Draft invoices never trigger reminders, no matter how many templates you have configured.

To check what is actually armed, go to the Work tab, select Invoicing, and filter by “With active reminder emails”. Opening an invoice from that list shows which rules are running and when the next reminder is scheduled to go out. It is a good habit to run that filter once a month.

What FreeAgent Reminders Do Not Cover

FreeAgent's reminders are solid for what they are: scheduled emails tied to an invoice due date. There are a few edges worth planning around.

They are email only. If a client responds better to a text or a quick call, that follow-up is still yours.
They apply to invoices raised in FreeAgent. Work billed through a separate platform, a marketplace, or a client portal sits outside the system.
Timing is tied to the due date, not to behaviour. A client who always pays on day 40 gets the same schedule as one who pays on day 2.
The reminder goes to whichever address your tags point at. If the finance contact changes and nobody updates the record, the emails keep landing in a mailbox nobody reads.

There is a quieter limitation too: reminders only exist for invoices you remembered to arm. Months of invoicing with the checkbox unticked is not covered retroactively. For those, FreeAgent offers a Quick Send reminder you can fire manually from an overdue invoice.

A Reminder Schedule That Works for Most Small Businesses

If you are starting from nothing, three templates cover the vast majority of situations without ever feeling pushy:

Three days before the due date: a short, friendly heads-up. This does more work than people expect, because most late payments are forgotten rather than disputed.
Three days after the due date: a brief note that the invoice is now past due, with the payment details repeated.
Ten days after the due date, set to recur weekly: a plain check-in that keeps going until the invoice is paid.

Spacing them this way avoids the same-day collision, gives the client room to pay before anything sounds serious, and means you are never the one deciding whether today is the day to chase. That last part is the real benefit. The awkwardness of following up is not the writing, it is the repeated decision about whether to send anything at all.

The scale of the problem justifies the setup time. The Federation of Small Businesses reported that 70% of small firms experienced late payments in the first quarter of 2025, with many saying things had worsened over the previous year. Reminders will not fix a client who genuinely cannot pay, but they do remove the far more common case: the invoice nobody ever actioned.

If FreeAgent Is Not Where All Your Invoices Live

Plenty of small businesses bill from more than one place. You might raise most invoices in FreeAgent, a few through a client's procurement portal, and the occasional one as a plain PDF from your email. FreeAgent will faithfully chase the first group and know nothing about the other two.

If that describes you, decide deliberately where follow-up lives rather than letting it default to memory. Some people consolidate everything into one invoicing tool. Others keep a tracked list of anything billed outside their main system and work through it weekly. Others add a dedicated reminder layer such as DueDrop, so the follow-up schedule does not depend on which tool produced the document.

Whichever route you take, the useful question is not which tool has the nicest reminder editor. It is whether every invoice you raise ends up inside something that will chase it. We covered how the major options compare in our guide to which accounting tools send automatic payment reminders, and there is a walkthrough of automating invoice follow-ups without switching accounting software if changing systems is not on the table.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does FreeAgent send payment reminders automatically?

Yes. FreeAgent can send automatic reminder emails before or after an invoice due date, and can repeat them at intervals until the invoice is paid. You need to create at least one invoice reminder template in Settings and tick the payment reminders option on each invoice for them to send.

Why are my FreeAgent invoice reminders not sending?

The three usual causes are a missing template, an unticked reminder box on the invoice itself, or an invoice still sitting in draft. Reminders only send for invoices that have been emailed to the client or marked as Sent. It is also worth checking that the email tag in the To field points at an address the client still monitors.

Can I set up more than one reminder in FreeAgent?

Yes, and most businesses should. You can create several templates with different wording and timing, for example one before the due date and one or two after. Just make sure no two are scheduled to land on the same day, because FreeAgent will send only one of them if they do.

Do FreeAgent reminders stop once the invoice is paid?

They do. Reminders automatically stop once an invoice has been marked as paid in full, including recurring reminders. The one thing to watch is a payment that arrives but is not recorded against the invoice, which will leave the reminders running on something already settled.

Can I send a one-off reminder without setting up automation?

Yes. FreeAgent includes a Quick Send reminder you can trigger manually on an overdue invoice, which is useful for older invoices that were raised before you set your templates up. FreeAgent also documents a wider set of automations aimed at getting invoices paid faster, including automatic thank-you emails once payment lands.

Key Takeaways

FreeAgent does send automatic payment reminders, but the feature is off until you build a template and enable it per invoice.
Templates live under Settings, then Email Templates, then Add Invoice Reminder.
Tick “Email payment reminders if the invoice goes unpaid”, or set it as a contact default.
Draft invoices never trigger reminders. The invoice must be sent or marked as Sent.
Space templates at different intervals, because only one reminder sends on any given day.
Three rules covers most cases: a nudge before the due date, one shortly after, and a weekly check-in.
Invoices raised outside FreeAgent are not covered, so decide where follow-up lives for those.