Does Thryv Send Automatic Payment Reminders?

You booked the job, finished the work, and sent the invoice out of Thryv without thinking twice about it. That was eighteen days ago. The invoice is sitting there marked Overdue, the client has not said a word, and you are stuck deciding whether to send the awkward email yourself or assume the software already handled it.

It is a reasonable thing to be unsure about. Thryv bundles your calendar, client list, messaging, and invoicing into one place, so following up on a late payment feels like it should already be running somewhere in the background. In many accounts it is. In many others it is switched off, and nobody mentioned there was a switch.

This post covers what Thryv sends on its own, where the settings live, what the reminders will not cover, and what to do about the invoices that fall outside them.

The short answer

Yes. Thryv Business Center can send automatic payment reminders to clients with an unpaid invoice, by email, by text, or both. Once configured, they run without you touching anything.

Two conditions are worth knowing before you rely on them: the reminder schedule is a setting you have to open and turn on, and the reminders only apply to invoices that live inside Thryv. Neither is a flaw exactly, but both are why people search this question after an invoice has gone quiet.

What Thryv actually sends on its own

Once reminders are enabled, a client with an open invoice receives an automated email or SMS at the intervals you set, with no action from you. Thryv describes this as freeing you and your staff from manual follow-up, which is a fair description of what it does when it is running.

Underneath that, Thryv tracks invoice status automatically. According to Thryv's own documentation on invoice statuses, an invoice moves from Draft to Not Yet Due to Due, then flips to Overdue the day after its scheduled due date. For invoices tied to a calendar booking, the clock starts the day after the service takes place. That status change is what the reminder logic hangs off, and the Overdue tag is visible to the client on the invoice itself.

Two related pieces often get confused with reminders, so it is worth separating them:

Automated billing generates and sends the invoice itself on a recurring schedule. That is invoice creation, not follow-up.
Scheduled payments in ThryvPay charge a card already on file at a set frequency, which means there is no unpaid invoice to chase in the first place.
Payment reminders are the third thing: a nudge sent about an invoice that exists, has been delivered, and has not been paid.

All three reduce late payments. Only the last one addresses a client who has already gone quiet.

Where the settings live

Reminders are configured in your invoice settings rather than on individual invoices, which is why they are easy to miss. In Thryv Business Center, open Settings from the left-hand navigation, then Payments, and look for the invoice section. The reminders control for overdue invoices sits near the bottom of that section, with a Type dropdown that governs how the reminder is sent and a Schedule dropdown that governs when.

A few adjacent settings are worth checking at the same time, because they change what your client actually receives:

Delivery method. Invoices and reminders can go out by email, by SMS, or both. Email is the default, and SMS has to be switched on separately.
SMS notifications. Under Settings, Auto client messaging, the Payments tab controls whether clients get a text alongside the email.
Default due date. If every invoice defaults to due on receipt, everything reads as overdue almost immediately, which trains clients to ignore the notice.
Message templates. Thryv lets you customize the automated messages and pull in fields from the client or business profile, so a reminder does not have to sound like a system alert.

If you have never connected a payment processor, walk through Thryv's payment and invoice settings walkthrough first. A reminder without a working pay-now link creates a second round of email, not a payment.

The gaps worth planning around

Thryv's reminders are genuinely useful, and they still leave a few predictable holes. Knowing where they are beats discovering them at the end of a slow month.

They start after the due date, not before

The reminder setting is built around overdue invoices. That means the most effective nudge in the whole sequence, the friendly note two or three days before payment is due, is not something the overdue reminder covers. A pre-due note is not chasing anyone; it is a courtesy that gives a client time to route the invoice through their own approval process before it ever goes late.

They only cover invoices inside Thryv

If you invoice a retainer client through a spreadsheet, take a deposit over the phone, or bill a larger account through a separate system because that is what their procurement team requires, Thryv has no record of it and will not remind anyone about it. Most service businesses have at least one of these, and it is usually the largest invoice of the month.

They are uniform by design

Automated schedules apply the same cadence to everyone. The client who always pays on day 32 and the one who has never been late get the identical sequence. Fine for most of your list, slightly wrong for the two or three relationships you would have worded differently.

Nothing reminds you

Separately from client-facing reminders, Thryv has an internal notification setting for overdue invoices that has to be set to notify you. If it is off, an invoice can quietly sit in Overdue for weeks without ever surfacing in your day.

If your reminders are not going out

When people report that Thryv reminders stopped working, the cause is usually one of a short list of things rather than a bug. Work through these in order:

Confirm the overdue reminders setting is actually enabled and has both a Type and a Schedule selected. A blank schedule means nothing fires.
Check the invoice status. Draft and Not Yet Due invoices are not overdue yet, so no reminder is expected. A Draft invoice was saved rather than sent, and the client has never seen it.
Verify the client record has a valid email address, and a mobile number if you are relying on SMS.
Check the due date on the invoice itself. If the due date is further out than you remember, the invoice is not overdue and the sequence has not started.
For recurring bookings, remember that only the first session in a series is marked Due. Later sessions stay Not Yet Due until their date approaches, so a reminder on session four is not late, it is early.
Confirm your own notification preference is set to remind you about overdue invoices, so you can see what the system is doing.

If all six check out and reminders still are not landing, test deliverability rather than configuration. Send yourself a test invoice at an address on a different domain and see whether it reaches the inbox or the spam folder.

Covering the invoices Thryv cannot see

For most Thryv users the practical answer is not to replace anything. Turn on the built-in reminders, set a schedule you would be comfortable receiving yourself, and let the platform handle everything it already knows about.

Then decide what happens to the rest. Some people keep a standing fifteen-minute slot on Friday to scan for anything unpaid outside the platform. Some send the pre-due note by hand because it is only a few clients. Some run a reminder layer on top of whatever they already use, which is the problem DueDrop was built for, so follow-up runs on one schedule whether the invoice started in Thryv, a spreadsheet, or an email attachment.

Any of those work. What does not work is assuming the platform covers everything, then finding out in a slow month that a third of your outstanding invoices were never in it. For comparison, we looked at which accounting tools send automatic payment reminders and which leave you hanging, and at how Housecall Pro handles the same question, which faces a similar split between scheduled work and one-off billing.

And if you would rather not add another tool at all, there are ways to automate invoice follow-ups without switching software using what you already have.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Thryv send payment reminders by text message?

Yes. Reminders can be delivered by email, by SMS, or both, but SMS is not on by default. You enable it under Settings, Auto client messaging, on the Payments tab, and each client record needs a valid mobile number for the text to reach them.

When does an invoice become overdue in Thryv?

An invoice flips to Overdue on the day after its scheduled due date. If the invoice is attached to a booking on your calendar, it becomes overdue the day after the service takes place. Overdue invoices show up in the client's account balance and carry a visible Overdue tag on the invoice.

Can I send a reminder before the invoice is due?

Not through the overdue reminder setting, which is triggered by the invoice going past its due date. A pre-due note has to be sent manually, built into your invoice message when you first send it, or handled by a separate reminder tool running alongside Thryv.

What is the difference between automated billing and payment reminders in Thryv?

Automated billing creates and sends the invoice on a recurring schedule. Payment reminders follow up on an invoice that has already been sent and has not been paid. Turning on automated billing does not turn on reminders, and the two are configured in different places.

Do ThryvPay scheduled payments replace reminders?

For the clients enrolled in them, more or less. ThryvPay scheduled payments charge a card on file on a set frequency, so there is no unpaid invoice to chase. Any client not on a scheduled payment still needs the reminder sequence.

The takeaway

Thryv answers the question in the title with a yes, provided you have opened the setting. The rest is deciding what happens to the invoices it does not know about.

Thryv Business Center sends automatic reminders on overdue invoices by email, SMS, or both, once enabled.
The setting lives under Settings, Payments, in the invoice section, with separate controls for how and when.
Invoices become overdue the day after the due date, or the day after a calendar service takes place.
Reminders start after the due date, so the pre-due nudge is still yours to handle.
Anything invoiced outside Thryv is invisible to the sequence and needs its own plan.
Turn on your own overdue notification too, so a quiet invoice does not stay quiet for a month.

Getting paid should not depend on remembering to check. Set the schedule once, decide who covers the gaps, and give the rest of your week back to the work you wanted to do. If you are still weighing options, a practical checklist for reminder tools is a reasonable place to start.