Does Paymo Send Automatic Payment Reminders?

You tracked the hours in Paymo, turned them into an invoice, sent it off, and moved on to the next project. Three weeks later that invoice is still sitting in the unpaid column, and you are trying to remember whether you ever actually followed up on it.

The assumption underneath that moment is a fair one. Paymo is a full project management and time tracking platform with real invoicing built in, so it feels like chasing an overdue invoice should be part of the package. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not, and the difference comes down to a settings page you may never have opened.

This post covers exactly what Paymo sends on its own, when it sends it, where the gaps sit, and what you can do about them without walking away from a tool that otherwise works well for you.

The short answer

Yes, Paymo can send automatic payment reminders, with two conditions attached.

The first is that you have to turn them on. Late payment reminders are not enabled by default. You will find them under your name in the bottom left, then Company settings, then Project accounting, then Invoices and estimates, then Late payment reminders. Until someone opens that page and configures a schedule, Paymo sends nothing.

The second condition matters more. Every reminder Paymo sends is a late payment reminder. They are all scheduled relative to the due date, and they all fire after it has already passed. Nothing goes out while the invoice is still current.

What Paymo sends automatically, and when

Once enabled, the feature is straightforward. According to Paymo's own help documentation, you can configure up to three automatic reminders per overdue invoice, and you control the spacing between them.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

Up to three reminders per unpaid invoice. Once the third goes out, the automation is finished. Anything after that is manual.
Timing is measured in days past the due date. You pick the intervals, so a schedule like three days, ten days, twenty-one days is entirely possible.
Delivery is by email. There is no built-in text message option for invoice reminders.
You get a copy of every reminder, sent to the address in your Company settings, so you always know what the client received.
The schedule is account-wide. It applies to every client and every unpaid invoice in the same way.

There is also a manual nudge button on the invoice itself, which is useful when you want to follow up outside the automated schedule. Paymo additionally supports recurring invoices, but it is worth being clear that recurring billing and reminders are separate systems. We wrote more about that distinction in why a recurring invoice won't follow up on a late payment for you.

The gap most freelancers miss: nothing fires before the due date

This is the part that surprises people. Paymo's reminders are built to react to lateness, not to prevent it. On the morning an invoice is due, your client has heard from Paymo exactly once, back when you first sent the invoice. If that email got buried, nothing brings it back up.

That timing gap is not a small detail. Intuit QuickBooks' 2026 Small Business Late Payments Report found that overdue invoices jumped twelve points in a single year, with an average of $17.7K owed and nearly three in five small businesses carrying at least one invoice more than thirty days past due.

What makes the pre-due window so valuable is that most late payments are not refusals. They are oversights. The invoice arrived during a busy week, it slid down the inbox, and nobody looked at it again until something prompted them. A short, friendly note two or three days before the due date catches a large share of those cases before they ever become late, which is a much easier conversation than the one that happens afterward.

One schedule for every client

The second limitation is that Paymo's reminder timing lives at the company level. You set it once, and it governs every client on your list.

For a solo consultant with five similar clients, that is fine. For most service businesses it is a blunt instrument. The client who has paid within two days for four years and the client who needed three follow-ups last quarter get treated identically. So does the corporate client whose finance team runs a strict thirty-day cycle and genuinely cannot pay faster, and who now receives a nudge that reads as impatient.

Your options are to set the schedule aggressively and risk irritating your reliable clients, or to set it gently and wait longer on the ones who actually need pressure. Neither is what you would choose if the tool let you vary it.

Email only, and what that costs

Paymo's invoice reminders go out by email. That is the standard across most invoicing tools, and for office-based clients it is usually the right channel.

It becomes a problem in two situations. The first is when your contact is not a desk worker. Contractors, trades, event vendors, and field service clients often live on their phones and treat email as a weekly chore. The second is when your email lands in a shared billing inbox that nobody owns, which is where a surprising number of invoices go quiet.

If either describes your clients, the automated schedule will keep firing into a channel that is not being watched, and the invoice will stay unpaid regardless of how many reminders technically went out.

What the free and entry plans limit

Paymo's free tier is generous on time tracking but tight elsewhere: one user, one client, and two projects. Its paid tiers start around six dollars per user per month billed annually, and open up unlimited clients and invoices.

The reminder settings themselves are not the bottleneck here, but the client and project caps are. If you are running a real client roster on the free plan, you will hit the ceiling long before reminder configuration becomes your main concern. Check your current plan before assuming the feature is broken.

How to close the gaps without leaving Paymo

None of this is a reason to switch platforms. Paymo does time tracking, project management, and invoice generation well, and reminders are a layer on top of that, not the core of it. A few adjustments get you most of the way:

Turn the reminders on today. This is the single highest-value change, and it takes about two minutes. A surprising number of Paymo users have never opened that settings page.
Set the first reminder early. Three days past due, not fourteen. Since most late invoices are settled within two weeks of the due date, an early nudge lands while the client is still likely to act on it.
Send a manual note before the due date. Use the nudge button, or a saved email template, two or three days out. It is the highest-leverage message you can send and Paymo will not send it for you.
Write clearer payment terms. Half of what reminders are compensating for is ambiguity about when payment is actually expected.
Watch the shared-inbox clients. If a client's billing address is a generic alias, get a named contact and copy them directly.

For the two gaps that settings alone cannot fix, the pre-due nudge and per-client timing, a dedicated reminder layer is the usual answer. Tools like DueDrop sit alongside the invoicing software you already use and handle only the follow-up, which means you keep Paymo for the work it does well and stop relying on a single account-wide schedule to cover every client relationship you have. If you are weighing that option, it is worth reading a payment terms section clients actually read first, because clearer terms often reduce how much follow-up you need in the first place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Paymo send payment reminders automatically by default?

No. Late payment reminders are off until you enable them in Company settings, under Project accounting, then Invoices and estimates. Until you configure a schedule there, Paymo sends the invoice and nothing further.

How many automatic reminders will Paymo send for one invoice?

Up to three. You choose the interval between each one, measured in days after the due date. After the third reminder the automation stops, and any further follow-up is manual.

Can Paymo remind clients before an invoice is due?

Not automatically. Paymo's reminder system is built entirely around the due date having already passed. If you want a pre-due nudge, you have to send it manually or use a separate tool that supports it.

Does Paymo send invoice reminders by text message?

No. Invoice reminders are email only. If your clients respond better to text, you will need to handle that channel yourself or add a tool that covers it.

Can I set different reminder timing for different clients in Paymo?

No. The reminder schedule is configured once at the company level and applies to every client and every unpaid invoice. There is no per-client override, so any variation has to be handled manually.

The takeaway

Paymo does send automatic payment reminders, and for many small businesses the built-in version is enough once it is switched on. The important thing is knowing where its edges are, and you can find more on that in our guide to invoice reminders and follow-up.

Reminders exist, but they are off until you enable them in Company settings.
You get up to three per invoice, spaced however you like, all measured from the due date.
Nothing goes out before the due date, which is the window where a gentle nudge does the most good.
One schedule covers every client, so reliable payers and slow payers are treated the same.
Delivery is email only, which matters if your clients are on their phones or behind a shared billing inbox.
Turning reminders on and setting the first at three days past due is a two-minute change with real upside.