Does Tave Send Automatic Payment Reminders? What Photographers Should Know

The gallery is delivered, the client is thrilled, and the final invoice went out of Tave sixteen days ago. It is still showing a balance due. So now you are doing the thing every photographer does eventually, which is hovering over that client's name in your inbox and trying to work out whether the software already nudged them and you would be piling on, or whether nothing has gone out at all and the silence is on you.

It is a fair thing to be unsure about. Tave is built to run a studio quietly in the background, so it feels reasonable to assume the follow-up is handled somewhere in the workflow alongside the contracts and the booking emails. In plenty of accounts it is. In plenty of others the reminders are sitting there fully written and switched off, because that is how they arrive.

This post walks through what Tave sends on its own, exactly when each reminder fires, where the settings live, what the built-in sequence will not cover, and what to do about the invoices that fall outside it.

The short answer

Yes, with a caveat that matters more than the yes does. Tave ships with three prebuilt invoice reminder automations that send email based on an invoice's due date. They arrive disabled. Until someone turns them on, nothing leaves your account, no matter how far past due a balance drifts.

The three reminders Tave already built for you

According to Tave's own documentation on invoice reminder automations, every account comes with a minimum of three reminder automations already assembled. They are identical in purpose and differ only in when they run:

Send 1st Invoice reminder, which fires one week before the invoice balance is due.
Send 2nd Invoice reminder, which fires on the morning the balance is due.
Send 3rd Invoice reminder, which fires three days after the due date.

All three watch the same trigger, Invoice > Balance due, and all three address the contact attached to that specific invoice rather than blasting every name on the job. The relative timing on each one is editable, so if a week ahead feels early for the way your clients pay, you can pull it in. What you cannot do is assume the sequence is running before you have gone in and enabled it.

Where the settings actually live

Two places, and you will likely need both. The message itself lives under Settings > Template Items > Email Templates, where Tave gives you a starter email called "Your next invoice is due soon." The automations that send that message live in your Automations list, and each of the three has to be switched on individually.

Read the template before you enable anything. Tave's default copy pulls in merge tokens for the balance, the due date, and how far away that date is, and all three of those are optional. You can rewrite the whole message in your own voice, and most studios should. Two tokens are not optional. The link_start and link_end tokens are what turn ordinary text into the button a client taps to pay through your secure booking site. Delete them while you are editing and you will send a genuinely warm reminder that gives the client no way to act on it.

A short checklist before you consider this done:

Enable each of the three reminder automations separately. Turning on the first does not turn on the other two.
Confirm the recipient is set to be determined by the observed item, so the email reaches whoever is responsible for that invoice.
Keep the payment link tokens in every template you touch, including any variants you write.
Add a payment promise condition if you would rather skip clients who have already told you a date.
Send yourself a test on a real invoice before trusting it with a client relationship.

The gaps worth planning around

The sequence ends three days past due

This is the one that catches people. The built-in cadence runs from a week before the due date to three days after it, and then it is finished. An invoice sitting at fourteen days late, or forty, gets nothing further unless you build additional automations yourself or write the email by hand. That would matter less if late payment were unusual. It is not. Bonsai's analysis of three years of invoicing data from more than 100,000 freelancers found that 29 percent of invoices were paid at least one day late, so the window after day three is not a rare edge case. It is where a real share of your outstanding money lives.

They only see invoices created inside Tave

The automation watches an invoice record in Tave. If a print order got billed through a separate storefront, or a commercial client insisted on being invoiced out of your accountant's system, or you sent a quick deposit request from your phone because it was faster, those balances are invisible to the sequence. They are not late in Tave's eyes. They are simply not there. This is the same structural limit you run into with most studio platforms, and it shows up the same way in 17hats and HoneyBook for anyone comparing options.

Every client receives the same message

One template covers the wedding couple who forgot, the corporate client whose accounts team needs a purchase order number, and the repeat portrait family you have photographed for six years. A uniform reminder is far better than no reminder, and it removes the awkwardness of writing each one. It is still a blunt instrument for a relationship business, and for your highest-value clients a short personal note usually lands better than the automated version.

Nothing in the sequence reminds you

Every one of these reminders points outward, at the client. None of them tap you on the shoulder to say a balance has now been unpaid for three weeks and the automation has run out of things to send. That job stays yours, which means the invoices most likely to go quiet are the ones you have to remember to check on manually.

If your Tave reminders are not going out

Before assuming anything is broken, work through the ordinary causes in order. Most silent reminder problems come down to one of these:

The automation is still disabled. This is the most common answer by a wide margin, since disabled is the state they ship in.
The invoice has no due date set, so there is no anchor for a relative trigger to count from.
The balance is already zero because a deposit or partial payment cleared it, and the trigger no longer applies.
A payment promise is recorded on the invoice, and your condition is correctly suppressing the reminder.
The recipient on the invoice has no valid email address, or the address bounced earlier and is being skipped.
You edited the template and removed the link tokens, so the send failed or went out unusable.
The invoice was created outside Tave, which means there is nothing for the automation to observe.

Covering the invoices the sequence cannot reach

Once the three built-in reminders are enabled and worded the way you would actually speak, you have solved the majority of your follow-up. What remains is a specific, predictable remainder: balances that go past day three, and invoices that were never created in Tave to begin with. Those two categories tend to hold the oldest and largest amounts, because nothing automatic is watching them.

Most studios handle that remainder one of three ways. You can extend the automations yourself by cloning the third reminder and setting new relative times at day ten, day twenty-one, and day thirty, which works well as long as you remember to maintain it. You can keep a standing calendar block, once a week, to scan for anything unpaid and write the notes personally. Or you can add a reminder layer that sits on top of the invoices you have already sent regardless of where they were created and keeps the follow-up going after your studio software stops, which is the gap tools like DueDrop are built to fill.

Whichever route you pick, the useful shift is to stop treating follow-up as something you do when you notice a balance and start treating it as something that runs whether or not you noticed. Tave gets you most of the way there in about fifteen minutes of setup. The rest is deciding who is responsible for the invoices its sequence was never designed to see.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are Tave's invoice reminders turned on by default?

No. Tave includes at least three reminder automations in every account, but they arrive disabled and each one has to be enabled individually. If you have never opened your Automations list, it is safe to assume no reminders have gone out.

When does each Tave reminder actually send?

Using the default settings, the first sends one week before the invoice balance is due, the second on the morning it is due, and the third three days after the due date. Each of those relative times is editable, so you can shift the whole cadence to match how your clients usually pay.

Can I add a fourth reminder further past the due date?

Yes. The three that ship with your account are ordinary automations, so you can duplicate one and set a new relative time such as ten or thirty days after the due date. It is worth doing if you routinely see invoices run past a week late, since the default sequence stops well before that.

Will Tave still email a client who told me when they plan to pay?

That depends on how the automation is built. Tave supports a payment promise condition that suppresses the reminder for any invoice where the client has already submitted a promised payment date. If you skip that condition, the reminder will send regardless, which can read as though you were not listening.

Do the reminders cover invoices I sent from another tool?

No. The automation observes invoice records inside Tave, so a balance billed through a print storefront, a separate accounting system, or an ad hoc deposit request is not visible to it. Those invoices need either a manual follow-up habit or a separate reminder system.

The takeaway

Tave can send automatic payment reminders, but the three prebuilt automations are disabled until you enable them.
The default cadence runs one week before the due date, the morning it is due, and three days after.
Keep the payment link tokens in any template you edit, or clients will receive a reminder with no way to pay.
The sequence stops at day three past due, which leaves your oldest balances unattended.
Anything invoiced outside Tave is invisible to the automation and needs its own follow-up plan.
Fifteen minutes of setup now removes most of the awkward chasing later, and the part it does not cover is small enough to plan around deliberately.