Overview

Automated dunning pursues overdue invoices without any action on your part: Kyvento detects late payment, sends staggered payment reminders and dunning notices, and escalates all the way to suspending the subscription. This article shows how to enable it and explains what then happens automatically.

Turning on dunning

Open Settings → "Dunning" (the "Billing" group). As long as dunning is switched off, a note points this out: you can first set everything up at your leisure and only then flip the "Active" switch in the top right. When you activate it, Kyvento creates four proven default dunning levels that you can adjust afterwards.

The basic options

• "Dun business customers" / "Dun private customers": controls which customer groups go through automated dunning.
• "Hide dunning levels from customers": hides the internal level staggering in customer communication.
• "BCC recipient": one or more email addresses (for example your accounting department) that receive a copy of every dunning notice – at the same time your archive of the dunning letters sent.
• "Delivery method": defines how dunning notices are delivered – the default is email.

What happens automatically after activation

1. Detecting overdue status: Every night, Kyvento checks all open invoices. If the due date (in your account time zone) has passed, the invoice switches to the "Overdue" status.
2. Dunning run: Shortly afterwards, the daily dunning run starts. For each overdue invoice it checks whether the waiting time of the next dunning level has been reached – and then sends the payment reminder or dunning notice by email, each with the dunning PDF and the original invoice attached.
3. Escalation: If payment fails to arrive, the invoice climbs the dunning ladder level by level – up to automatic payment retry, suspending the subscription, and marking it as uncollectible (depending on the level configuration).
4. Automatic end: As soon as payment is received in full, the dunning process ends immediately on its own – details in the article "Matching incoming payments automatically".

Which invoices are dunned

Automatic dunning applies to subscription invoices with an open amount. Manually created invoices without a subscription reference only take part if you have explicitly enabled dunning for the respective invoice – so individual special invoices never end up in the dunning loop unintentionally. Individual invoices can also be paused at any time via a dunning hold.

Seeing the dunning state of an invoice

The invoice detail page shows the current dunning status: which stage has been reached, when the last reminder went out and when the next one would be due. From there you can also pause the run for this single invoice — during an instalment agreement, for example — and resume it later in the same place. The invoice stays overdue; only further reminders are held back.

Dunning fees default to €0, so they are effectively off. If you enable them later, they apply from the next dunning stage onwards — stages already passed are not retroactively charged.

Good to know

• Dunning applies per Kyvento account – the configuration affects all your customers according to the customer-group switches.
• Payment reminders and dunning notices do not receive their own invoice number – they are not invoices within the meaning of Section 14 of the German VAT Act (UStG) and do not create gaps in your number ranges.

Next steps

• Set up levels, texts and fees – see "Customizing dunning levels and texts"
• Understand and adjust deadlines – see "Setting dunning deadlines"
• Keep an eye on ongoing dunning – see "Open receivables at a glance"