Dubsado’s Recurring Invoice feature is one of its coolest, but one of the questions I see all the time is about how to set up a reminder for a recurring invoice BEFORE the due date. While possible, the way to accomplish this is not at all intuitive, so I thought a how-to blog was due!

Part 1

The first thing you need is a Payment Plan that sets the due date for the invoice a certain number of days “after payment plan applied to invoice”. This is the ONLY trigger that will work for the process we are creating here. Make sure the number of days after it’s applied to invoice is EQUAL TO the number of days before the due date REMINDER you want to send. So if your Recurring Invoice is going to be due on the first of the month every month and you want a reminder to go out 1 week before, set the due date to 7 days after payment plan applied to invoice. Then build in all of your reminders.

Part 2

Once you’ve got your Payment Plan setup, then it’s time to go create your Recurring Invoice. Head to the relevant project and start the process of setting it up. Here’s where things get interesting.

Set your STARTING DATE to be 7+1, so 8, days before the actual due date. This will generate the invoice 8 days before the due date so that your 7 day out reminder can go. If you’re not doing 7 days, just make sure it’s generated 1 day before your first reminder.

Apply your recurring invoice payment plan so that your automated reminders will go.

Now this might get a little wonky for the FIRST MONTH ONLY, if you’re setting up the recurring invoice a different number of days out than 8 (for this example, whatever your magic number is). Once you “start recurrence”, you can manually update the invoice due date to the correct first FIXED due date. You won’t have to do that again, it’s just for the first one!

Sounding like gibberish? Check out this step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots.