QuickBooks invoice reminders: a setup guide for plumbers
2026-10-11 · 6 min read
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It is Tuesday morning and whoever does the books at a three-truck plumbing shop has the aging report open. Eleven invoices are past due. Two of them are water heater installs. One is a property manager who pays everything at 45 days no matter what the invoice says. Three are service calls where the customer said "just send me the bill" at the door, and nobody has thought about them since. There are also two checks on the dashboard of the van that nobody has entered yet.
QuickBooks Online can send reminders on its own. Most shops I talk to either never turned that on, or turned it on once and forgot what it does. The setup takes a few minutes. Knowing which invoices it skips matters more.
How to turn on QuickBooks invoice reminders
Everything in this section comes from Intuit's help article on invoice reminders, which I checked on October 11, 2026. The article was last updated October 5, 2026.
- Select the gear icon, then Account and settings, then the Sales tab.
- In the Reminders section, select Edit and turn on Automatic invoice reminders.
- Turn on Reminder 1 and pick how many days before or after the due date it goes out. You can add a second and third reminder. Each one can be scheduled up to 90 days before or after the due date.
- Edit the subject line, greeting, and message. Intuit suggests keeping the word "reminder" in the subject and using fields like the invoice number and your company name.
- If you want a PDF of the invoice attached, that setting lives under Online delivery on the same Sales tab.
To nudge one invoice by hand, open the invoice list, find the invoice, open the Receive payment dropdown and choose Send reminder. The article says QuickBooks Online Advanced users build reminders with workflows instead.
Three rules from the article matter more than the setup steps:
- Reminders only go out on invoices that are unpaid and that you already emailed from QuickBooks.
- One reminder template covers every invoice reminder.
- Edits only apply to reminders that have not gone out yet.
A reminder schedule that fits a plumbing shop
Most residential service calls are due on receipt, so a reminder before the due date does nothing. For those, I would set Reminder 1 at 3 days after the due date, Reminder 2 at 10 days, and Reminder 3 at 21 days. For commercial and property management accounts on net terms, a reminder a few days before the due date earns its place, because their payables person is batching bills that week anyway.
Since every invoice gets the same reminder wording, write it for the polite end of the range: what the invoice is for, the amount, the pay link, and a phone number. Firmer wording belongs in a later message a person decides to send. For the full sequence, the overdue invoice email templates cover subject lines from day one to final notice.
Where QuickBooks reminders stop
Turning the setting on helps. The trouble is that the invoices that go stale at a plumbing shop are usually ones it never sees.
| The gap | What happens | What fills it |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice handed over at the door or never emailed | No reminder ever goes out, because the article limits reminders to invoices you emailed | Send every invoice from QuickBooks the day the job closes, even when the customer got a paper copy |
| Check on the dashboard, not entered | QuickBooks still sees the invoice as unpaid and keeps reminding a customer who already paid | Record payments the same day, from a photo of the check |
| Homeowner and property manager get the same words | One template for everyone, so it reads too stiff for one and too soft for the other | A second channel for the accounts that need different wording |
| The customer reads texts, not email | The article only describes email reminders | A text with the pay link, sent outside QuickBooks |
| Third reminder goes out and nothing happens | The sequence ends and the invoice sits in the aging report | A short list each week of who ignored all three |
I don't count any of this against QuickBooks. It is an accounting system, and it reminds people about the invoices it knows are open. A plumbing shop's money tends to get stuck before the invoice reaches QuickBooks, and it stays stuck after the last reminder goes out.
What closing those gaps looks like
QuickBooks stays where it is as your books. The work happens around it:
- When a tech closes a job in the field, the invoice is created and emailed from QuickBooks that afternoon, so it is inside the reminder window from day one.
- A text goes to the customer with the same pay link. Customers who never open email still see it.
- A photo of a check, taken in the van, gets recorded against the invoice that day, which stops the reminder that would have gone to a customer who already paid.
- Property managers and commercial accounts get their own follow-up with wording that fits how they pay, and the QuickBooks reminder still covers everyone else.
- Every Monday the owner gets one short list: invoices past the third reminder, with the amount, the age, and the last thing the customer said.
I built the payment side of this for a Chicago-area pool service company: Stripe payments on their website, tied into the same system that tracks their leads, so the path from first inquiry to paid sits in one place. A plumbing shop on QuickBooks has the same problem with different software in the middle.
What stays with you
The phone call stays with a person. A customer who has ignored three reminders is not going to read a fourth one. That is a conversation, and it usually goes better than you expect. Disputes stay human too. If the customer thinks the drain came back too soon, a reminder sent into that is the fastest way to lose the next job and earn a bad review.
Payment plans, late fees, and when to send a final notice stay with you as well. Those depend on the customer and on your own state's rules, so check the rules before you threaten anything. The system does the same steps every week. What to do about one particular customer is your call.
There is more on what I build for shops like yours on the plumbing contractors page. Builds start at $500 one-time, then a flat monthly from $99 after an included run-in period, cancellable.
Where to start
If you want this set up around your QuickBooks, or you just want to see where your invoices actually stall, book the free 20 minute process audit. We walk one week of closed jobs from the truck to paid and find the gaps. Start here.