Melio and Payment Reminders: What It Automates and What It Doesn't

The invoice went out three weeks ago. The client said thanks, the project wrapped up well, and since then your inbox has been quiet. You are now doing the math on whether to send another note, and how to word it so it lands as a nudge rather than a complaint.

If you bill through Melio, there is a question worth asking before you draft anything: is the app already reminding this client for you? Melio does send automatic payment reminders, but they are opt-in per invoice rather than on by default, and plenty of people never find the checkbox that turns them on.

This guide covers what Melio's reminders actually do, where the settings live, how to send a one-off nudge for a single overdue invoice, and where the built-in sequence runs out of road. By the end you should know exactly which part of your follow-up Melio is handling and which part is still yours.

Does Melio Send Automatic Payment Reminders?

Yes. Melio includes automatic invoice reminders in its Get Paid tools, and they are delivered by email to the address on the invoice. According to Melio's own help documentation, you can switch reminders on when you create an invoice, or turn them on later for an invoice that already exists.

The important detail is that this is a per-invoice setting. There is a checkbox near the bottom of the invoice screen labelled Send automatic payment reminders. If it is unchecked, that invoice sits silently until you do something about it. This catches people out, because most invoicing tools treat reminders as an account-wide default that applies to everything.

So the honest answer to "does Melio remind my clients?" is: only for the invoices where you told it to. If you have never opened your reminder settings, it is worth checking a few recent invoices before you assume anything has been sent.

How to Turn Melio's Automatic Reminders On

There are two paths, depending on whether the invoice exists yet.

For a new invoice, sign in and select Get Paid in the left sidebar, then Create invoice in the top right. Scroll to the bottom of the create screen and tick Send automatic payment reminders before you finish and share the invoice. Your client will then receive reminders at their email address on whatever schedule you have set.

For an invoice you already sent, open the Invoices tab in the Get Paid dashboard and select the invoice from the list. In the invoice details window, choose More at the bottom left, then Edit. Scroll to the bottom of the edit screen, tick the same checkbox, and save. You can uncheck it again at any point if a client asks you to stop.

It is worth doing a sweep through your open invoices the first time. Anything issued before you knew the checkbox existed is almost certainly sitting there with reminders switched off.

Where to Set the Reminder Schedule and Message

The checkbox decides whether an invoice gets reminders. A separate screen decides when they go out and what they say.

Select Settings in the left sidebar, then Invoice reminders under the Get Paid section. You will see a list of reminder timings with a toggle beside each one, and you can turn on more than one. Whatever combination you enable becomes the schedule applied to every invoice with reminders switched on.

On the same screen, Customize reminder lets you edit the email message your clients receive. This is the highest-value ten minutes in the whole setup. The default wording is fine but generic, and generic is exactly what clients skim past. Rewriting it in your own voice, with a plain sentence about how to pay, makes a measurable difference to whether anyone acts on it.

If you want reminders to stop entirely, Melio documents that separately in its guide on turning off automatic invoice reminders, either for one invoice or across the board.

Sending a One-Off Reminder for a Single Invoice

Sometimes you do not want a schedule. You want to nudge one client, today, about one invoice. Melio supports that without touching your automatic settings.

Open the Invoices tab in Get Paid, find the invoice, and select the three-dot icon on the right. Choose Send reminder from the drop-down. The Send reminder screen opens, and selecting Share invoice emails your client. Melio's walkthrough of manual reminders also notes that you can pick Customize email to change the wording first, or Share a payment link to copy a link and send it yourself through whatever channel the client actually reads.

That last option matters more than it sounds. A copied payment link you can paste into a text message or a project channel often gets a faster response than a fourth email that lands beside three earlier ones.

What Melio's Reminders Don't Do

The built-in reminders are useful, and for clients who simply forgot they are often enough. But they are a scheduling feature, not a follow-up strategy, and there are limits worth naming before you rely on them.

They are opt-in per invoice. Any invoice where you forgot the checkbox is a silent invoice, and there is no automatic safety net that catches it later.

They are email only. If your client's accounts team routes billing mail into a shared inbox that nobody watches closely, more email is not the fix.

A few other gaps come up regularly:

• The message is the same for every client, so a long-standing customer and a first-time client get identical wording.
• There is no escalation. The tone of the last reminder matches the tone of the first.
• Reminders are tied to invoices inside Melio, so anything you billed elsewhere is not covered.
• There is no prompt telling you when an invoice has gone quiet long enough that a human should step in.
• You get no view of which clients consistently need chasing and which always pay on the first nudge.

None of this makes Melio a poor choice. It simply means the reminders cover the easy part of the problem, and the awkward part is still sitting with you.

Building a Follow-Up Rhythm on Top of Melio

The fix is not to fight the tool. It is to decide which stage belongs to Melio and which stage belongs to a person, and then stop improvising the rest.

Let Melio own everything up to about a week past due. Switch reminders on for every invoice you issue, set the schedule once, rewrite the default message so it sounds like you, and then leave it alone. That stage is genuinely automatic and does not need your attention.

Around day ten, send the first message that is clearly from you rather than from software. Short, warm, no apology, one clear next step. Most invoices that were going to stall get unstuck right here.

Around day twenty-one, change who you are talking to rather than what you are saying. Ask your contact who handles payables and copy them in. A surprising share of late invoices are not disputes at all, just messages sitting with someone who cannot approve them.

Past thirty days, move off email entirely. A short phone call resolves more in five minutes than another week of polite messages. If you are unsure where the sensible stopping point is, we worked through how many reminders to send before you stop in a separate guide.

If the part that slips is the day-ten and day-twenty-one nudges, that is a tooling gap rather than a discipline problem, and it is the gap DueDrop was built to fill: the human-sounding follow-ups that come after your invoicing app has finished its part. If you are weighing options, our buyer checklist for invoice reminder software lays out what to compare. We also covered the same question about Invoice2go, which behaves quite differently.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are Melio payment reminders on by default?

No. Reminders are enabled per invoice using the Send automatic payment reminders checkbox on the create or edit invoice screen. Invoices created without ticking it will not trigger any automatic email.

How do I change when Melio sends reminders?

Go to Settings, then Invoice reminders under the Get Paid section. Toggle on the reminder timings you want. You can enable more than one, and the combination applies to every invoice that has reminders switched on.

Can I edit the reminder email Melio sends?

Yes. On the Invoice reminders settings screen, choose Customize reminder and edit the email message field, then save. It is worth doing, because the default wording is generic and easy for clients to skim past.

How do I send a reminder for one specific invoice?

Open Get Paid, select the Invoices tab, find the invoice, click the three-dot icon and choose Send reminder. From there you can share the invoice by email, customize the text first, or copy a payment link to send yourself.

Does Melio send text message reminders?

The automatic reminder feature sends email. If your client responds better to text, use the Share a payment link option to copy the link and send it through whichever channel they actually read.

The Takeaways

If you keep five things from this guide, make them these:

• Melio reminders are opt-in per invoice, not on by default, so check the box every time you bill.
• The schedule and the message live in Settings, under Invoice reminders in the Get Paid section.
• Rewriting the default reminder text in your own voice is the single highest-return change you can make.
• For one-off nudges, use the three-dot menu on the invoice and the Send reminder option.
• Built-in reminders cover roughly the first week past due; the follow-ups after that are still a human job.

Set the defaults once, sweep your open invoices to switch reminders on, and decide now what happens at day ten. That decision, made calmly in advance, is what keeps a late invoice from turning into an awkward conversation later.