The job finished Tuesday. The invoice went out by email Tuesday night. It is now the following Friday, the customer has said nothing, and the parts bill for that job is due on the first. You do not want to call, because calling about money feels like collections. So the invoice sits there, and it sits there next week too.
That is the receivables problem for a one-to-ten-truck plumbing, HVAC, electrical or roofing company, and text fixes most of it, because the invoice email is under forty other emails and the text is not. This is the sequence: the deposit text, the invoice-sent text, the 7, 14 and 30 day reminders, what to do when the customer replies with a problem, and who in the office owns it.
Why the Invoice Is Still Open
Slow payment is the normal state of the trade, not a sign you picked a bad customer. Levelset's 2022 Construction Cash Flow and Payment Report, a survey of 519 construction companies, found that only 12% of businesses report always being paid on time, and fewer than 4 in 10 are paid within 30 days on average, even though nearly 9 in 10 offer terms of 30 days or less.
That report leans commercial, where the slow payer is a general contractor on a draw schedule. In residential service the slow payer is a homeowner who meant to pay and did not get round to it. A sub chasing a GC needs lien paperwork. A plumber chasing a homeowner needs the invoice in front of them on the device they are already looking at, a way to pay that takes thirty seconds, and a reminder cadence nobody has to remember. The whole sequence runs from one business number, the same one the customer got the on-my-way text from.
The Deposit Text Before the Job
The first money text goes out before any work happens. It collects the deposit, and it trains the customer that this number is where invoices come from.
Trigger: estimate accepted. Send: within the hour, from the office.
Hi Dana, this is Mike at Ridgeline Plumbing. Good to have you on the schedule for the water heater on Thu 10/23. A $450 deposit holds the slot: [link]. Reply here with any questions.
No reply after 24 hours: one nudge, nothing more by text.
Dana, still holding Thu 10/23 for the water heater. Deposit link again in case it got buried: [link]. If the date no longer works, just reply and we'll move it.
No reply after another 48 hours: phone call. Never release a slot by text alone.
The Invoice-Sent Text, Within the Hour
This message sets the clock. It goes from the office within an hour of the tech closing the job, while the customer is still looking at the new water heater and still feels good about it.
Hi Dana, the water heater is done and Luis has left. Invoice #1187 for $1,840 is here: [link]. Card or bank, due in 14 days. If anything isn't right with the install, reply here first.
Two things in that message matter more than the amount. The invoice number, because every later reminder refers to it. And the line about replying first if something is wrong. A complaint that surfaces on day one is a callback you can schedule. The same complaint surfacing on day 30, in reply to a reminder, is an unpaid invoice with a dispute attached. The office sends this one, by hand or queued, when the tech marks the job done. It is never the tech's job.
The 7, 14 and 30 Day Ladder
Three reminders, each with a trigger, a wait and a no-reply action. The ladder assumes 14-day terms. Shift the days if yours differ, but keep the shape: friendly, then factual, then a clear ask for contact.
Day 7, still unpaid. Friendly, with an out in case they already paid.
Dana, quick one from Ridgeline: invoice #1187 ($1,840) for the water heater is still open, due 11/6. Link: [link]. If you've already sent it, ignore this and thank you.
Day 14, the due date. Factual, and it opens the door to a plan before the invoice is late.
Dana, invoice #1187 for $1,840 is due today. You can pay here: [link]. If you need to split it, reply and we'll set something up. Mike, Ridgeline Plumbing.
Day 30, 16 days past due. The last text in the sequence, and it asks for contact, not just payment.
Dana, invoice #1187 ($1,840) is now 16 days past due. We need to hear from you this week on a payment or a plan. Reply here or call Mike at 555-0142. Link: [link].
After day 30: the texting stops, the owner calls, and a letter follows the voicemail. The customer has seen four messages and chosen not to answer, and a fifth does not change that.
Three rules. Any reply exits the ladder: cancel the scheduled messages the moment a conversation starts. Every message carries the invoice number, the amount and the link, so a customer who decides to pay at 10 p.m. does not have to scroll back for them. And never threaten by text anything that is not in your signed agreement. Late fees and lien rights belong in the contract and in a letter. If your state gives you lien rights on residential work, the deadline is a fixed calendar date, so put it on the account when the job closes.
When the Customer Replies
Most replies fall into five buckets, and the office should have a quick reply for each.
"I paid that." Check before you answer. If it landed, confirm and close the thread. If not, ask for the date and the last four digits of the card so you can trace it.
"Can I pay next week?" Say yes, name the date, and schedule the reminder for the day before.
No problem, Dana. I'll note Fri 11/14 for invoice #1187. I'll send the link again the day before so it's handy.
A partial payment. Thank them, restate the remainder and the date, and restart the ladder from day 7 on the balance.
Got the $900, thank you. That leaves $940 on invoice #1187. Does Fri 11/21 work for the rest?
"The work was wrong." Stop everything. Cancel the remaining reminders, reply within the hour that the owner is calling, and have the owner call that day. A dispute handled by phone becomes a paying customer again. A dispute handled by text becomes a one-star review with your reminder quoted in it.
STOP, or anything that reads like it. Honor it that day and move the account to email and phone. The invoice is still owed. The channel is closed.
Who Owns the Inbox and What Monday Looks Like
Receivables belongs to one person: the office manager or whoever does the books. Not the owner, and not the techs. That person's Monday looks like this.
Run the aging list from your invoicing tool and sort it against the ladder. Every job closed last week with an open invoice gets its day-7 reminder scheduled for Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Every invoice due this week gets the day-14 message scheduled for that morning. Anything crossing 30 days gets the final text scheduled, and the owner gets a note that a call is due Thursday.
Queue all of it as scheduled sends in one sitting, then forget about it. Reminders go out at 10 a.m. local, weekdays only. Nothing on Sundays and nothing after 6 p.m., because a money message at 8:30 p.m. feels like a threat even when the words are friendly. Through the week, the office works replies as they land.
Measure three things: median days from the invoice-sent text to paid, the share of invoices paid before the day-7 reminder ever goes out, and the count of invoices that reached the day-30 text this month. The third is the one the owner cares about.
Running the Ladder From One Phone
A field company sending a few hundred invoice texts a month needs four things: a number the customer already has, a scheduler that fires on time, a shared inbox so the office and the owner see the same thread, and canned replies for the five buckets.
Android Texter runs all of that off an Android phone you already own. The phone sends ordinary person-to-person SMS from its own 10-digit number, with no brand registration, campaign vetting or monthly campaign fees, because the traffic is a person texting from a handset rather than an application sending through an aggregator. The dashboard has a scheduled-send picker for queuing the week's reminders, a scheduled-messages view for cancelling one when the customer replies, slash-shortcut quick replies, and a conversation-threaded inbox the office and the owner share. A forwarding rule can mirror a customer's inbound to the owner's personal phone while a dispute is live.
Where it loses: if you already run Jobber or Housecall Pro with automated invoice reminders on a registered line, and they are landing, you may not need anything else. A multi-branch operation sending thousands of invoice messages a month, fully registered, is usually better served by a mainstream A2P provider. The one-phone approach is for the owner-operator and the small office. If you take cards through Helcim, the receipt-by-text flow is written up here and pairs well with the invoice-sent message.
Consent, Quiet Hours and STOP
Invoice reminders to a customer who hired you are informational messages about their own transaction, not promotion. The FCC's quiet-hours restriction in 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1) applies to telephone solicitations, which the rule defines as messages encouraging a purchase, and bars those before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. at the called party's local time. Keep reminders inside those hours anyway.
Consent is still yours to get and keep. Collect the mobile number and permission to text about the job at the estimate stage, and keep the record. Whether a past job on its own covers later texts is less settled than most contractors assume, and we have covered the established business relationship question separately. A customer can revoke by any reasonable means, and the standard keywords always count; what counts as STOP and how fast you must honor it is here. None of this is legal advice, and sending the reminder from your own phone does not change any of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many payment reminder texts should a contractor send?
Four, counting the invoice-sent message: the invoice within an hour of finishing, then reminders at day 7, day 14 and day 30. After that, stop texting and call. Any reply from the customer ends the sequence, and a dispute cancels every remaining scheduled message immediately.
Should the technician or the office send the invoice text?
The office. Techs send the on-my-way and running-late texts because those are about the visit. Money messages come from the office on the business number, so the tech keeps the relationship on the next visit and the customer always knows which number invoices come from.
Can I text an invoice reminder after 9 p.m.?
The FCC's quiet-hours rule is written for telephone solicitations, and an invoice reminder for work already done is not promotional. Stay inside 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time regardless, and in practice send money messages between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays. A late-night reminder reads as a threat whatever the words say.
Put the Ladder on One Number
The ladder takes an afternoon to set up and ten minutes a Monday to run. Android Texter sends it as ordinary SMS from an Android phone you already own, with scheduled sends, quick replies and a shared inbox, and no carrier registration between you and your own customers. Pair a phone and queue your first week of reminders at androidtexter.com.