The core of dunning is matching tone to invoice age. An invoice that is five days late usually needs nothing more than a short "in case this slipped through" with the amount and a payment link; one that is sixty days late warrants a clear statement of what is owed, since when, and what happens next. The schedule matters more than any single message: many late invoices are simple oversights — the email landed in spam, the person who approves payments was away — and a calm, predictable cadence resolves those cases before anyone has to make an awkward phone call. The reminders that do reach genuinely reluctant payers then carry more weight, because they arrive as step three of a visible process rather than a sudden outburst.
Automating dunning is tempting because the work is repetitive and easy to postpone — and risky because the audience is your existing customer base. A reminder sent for an invoice that was settled yesterday, or a firm notice that ignores a partial payment, damages exactly the relationships that fund your business. So dunning automation lives or dies on two things: reminders that reflect the actual state of each invoice, and a human checkpoint before anything reaches a customer's inbox.
In Brohns, dunning is one of the built-in agent roles: a finance agent drafts payment reminders for your own overdue invoices, with wording that escalates politely as each invoice ages. Every reminder is held for per-item approval — you read it, adjust the tone if it's wrong for that particular customer, and only then does it go out, through your own connected email sender rather than some third-party address. That sign-off is enforced on the server, not merely implied by the interface, and every approved reminder is recorded in an audit log. Because these are steady, low-drama messages, dunning is also a natural place to climb the autonomy ladder once a few weeks of drafts have gone out exactly as written.