Escalations are a type of action you take in Paidnice when an invoice is overdue that requires review and input from a human. An example would be to schedule a phone call following up an overdue invoice 14 days past the due date.

There are 3 types of escalation in Paidnice:

When an escalation is raised on an overdue invoice, it will appear in the Escalations page within Paidnice, and optionally you can email instructions to handle the escalation to a person or team responsible for handling it.

To start create a new escalation for your group by clicking the Escalation button:

This will add the escalation to the group workflow, so that you can configure and save it.

You can read more information about how policies and groups of customers work here.

Once you have created your escalation policy you need to configure it. There are several options to choose, here's an example:

You should give your escalation a meaningful name, in the example above it is called 'Halt projects @ 30 days overdue' so that it's clear from the group workflow screen what the escalation does.

Choose what type of escalation and when it should be raised. This is most commonly going to be after the due date, but if it possible to schedule escalations in a range of situations.

The instructions you input here will be sent to any notify email addresses and will be visible in the Escalations page for the team who is completing the escalations.

You can use merge tags in the instructions in the same way you can in an email template. In the example above you can see the merge tags for InvoiceNumber and ContactName have been used to give the account manager more relevant information when they halt the work on this customer project.

Once you have saved your escalation policy, Paidnice will schedule any actions for future dates so that you can see what actions will be taken and when on the actions screen.

If you do not see the actions scheduled for an invoice you can find out why by previewing policies on the invoice screen:

If the escalation is not applicable to the invoice the reason why will be shown here.

Testing the escalation

You can force any action that is scheduled to run immediately by clicking the 'action now' button. This will cause the escalation to be raised immediately and will ignore Safe mode.

This can be useful if you create a test invoice for yourself and you can experience the workflow of the escalation - it will send instructions by email and it will appear on the Escalations page to be completed.

For more information on how to use the Escalations page to complete escalations see the Escalations article.

Once the main configuration is complete, you can also select special configuration on the More Options tab, you can select multiple options and then configure each one.

Apply only to invoices due from

Apply only to invoices due before

These options determine when to start and stop applying the policy, based on the due date of the invoices.

Minimum Due Amount

These options can ensure you do not raise escalations on invoices that are too small.

Exclude Branding Themes

This option relates only to Xero. You can determine which Branding themes will not have any escalations raised - this can be useful if you send some branding themes that require special handling.

Exclude invoice lines

These accounts (Xero) or items (QuickBooks) will be excluded. If an invoice is completely excluded then no escalation is raised. If it is partially excluded then it is raised as normal.

Action time

This determines when in the day the escalations are raised. You may wish to set this to the very start or end of a day to allow time for any bookkeeping the day prior or during the day or ensure business hours for better processing of escalations.