Send Reminder Before Invoice Due Date

Hi, is there any way to send an email reminder, for example 5 days before the invoice due date. Currently we can only send an email reminder after the invoice due date. If I enter a negative value would this work or break things? For example if I enter -5 into the “Days after due date” field would this work?

I don’t think it would work as the reminder expects the invoice to exist.

One approach may be to send the invoice 5 days early and set the due date to 5 days later.

I need this functionality also.
And the answer by Hillel doesn’t make sense (at least to me).

The invoice exists before the due date.

The request was to send a reminder before the DUE date, not before the INVOICE date.

The invoice should already exist, as long as, in this case, the invoice was created more than 5 day before the due date.

djex81 - did you try using a negative number?

I did try a negative number but it does not work. I agree with you that this needs to be a feature. I’d even say it would be more useful than the current reminder implementation.

We’ll look into adding support for negative numbers in a future release.

Note: it’s possible the invoice won’t yet exist in which case the reminder wouldn’t be sent.

Hi Hillel. I’m not sure I follow what your saying and maybe your misunderstanding what we are trying to describe. Maybe this will help.

Example:
I create a new invoice and set the due date to December 31, 2015. I want a reminder to be sent 5 days BEFORE the invoice is due (December 31, 2015) and so the reminder would be sent on December 26, 2015.

Currently we only have the ability to send a reminder AFTER the invoice due date.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say it is possible the invoice will not exist yet. The reason I asked about the negative number was only as a work around suggestion. I was hoping by inputting -5 instead of 5 that it would subtract from the invoice due date but obviously it is not coded in a way that would allow that to work. It would probably be best to have a radio box to set the reminder as either before due date or after due date instead of just allowing negative numbers to be input.

Thanks for your example!

To explain ‘possible the invoice won’t yet exist’ using your example, if you set the value to -30 (or choose ‘days before’ rather than after) then we couldn’t send the reminder as the invoice may not have existed on Dec 1st. With positive values/days after this wouldn’t be an issue.

I agree, a radio button would be better than a negative value.

Here’s a solution that would prevent invoices not existing yet…

Have an option (radio btn) to set the days sent to be after the due date OR after the INVOICE date.
And if the default is after the due date it should prevent any problems when upgrading (i.e. all existing ones would stay the same).

Although, not having looked at the code, I’m not sure how you actually generate and save a reminder date at the time you create the invoice then this should be an easy change; however, if you are calculating the date on the fly (when checking for reminders to send) then it might involved a bit more code (and possibly time to process).

This is actually how ‘other’ companies (which I just migrated from) handle this issue (although ALL of their reminders are sent based on the invoice date - which is limiting in a different way).

Thanks for the suggestion!

I’ve added it to our roadmap which can be seen here: https://trello.com/b/63BbiVVe/invoice-ninja