AutoCollect Payment Reminders

Topic

AutoCollect

For

Front Office Team

Read Time

~3 minutes

Chasing unpaid balances is the part of billing nobody has time for. AutoCollect does it for you: once a payment request has been sent, it keeps reminding the patient by email and text until they pay or until the collection window closes.

AutoCollect is available to offices on Smile Advantage Payments with payment requests switched on.

Switching it on for a request

1. Open the payment request. Find it under Payments, then Payment Requests, and click into it.
2. Find the toggle. In the information column on the left, look below Last Notification for AutoCollect.
3. Switch it on. The toggle reads On or Off, with a coloured dot beside it. Below it, Next run tells you when the next message is due.

New requests inherit your office’s default, so if your office has AutoCollect switched on, you usually do not have to do anything.

What the reminders do

The patient gets the request itself when you send it. After that, AutoCollect takes over: it checks once a day and sends a reminder by both email and text, leaving at least 10 days between messages, until the balance is paid or the 90-day collection window closes. That works out to around nine reminders at most.

The 90 days run from the day collection started, which for most requests is the day you sent it. Sending has to happen for the clock to start, and restarting a request later resets it to zero.

The messages change with the situation. The patient gets an opening reminder, then ongoing reminders, and once the due date passes, overdue notices instead.

A few things it will not do:

• It skips patients who have paid. As soon as a request is settled, the reminders stop.
• It respects text opt-outs. A patient who has not consented to messages gets email only.
• It never runs on a draft. This is the one that catches people out. See below.
• It waits if the patient has heard from you recently. The 10-day gap counts the emails and texts you send by hand as well as the automatic ones, so sending one yourself pushes the next automated reminder out.

A draft is never chased

AutoCollect only works on a request that has actually been sent by email or text. If you created a request and printed it, or copied the link and sent it yourself, the request is still a draft and no reminder will ever go out. Send it from the request page first. See Sending a Payment Request.

What Failed means

When AutoCollect reaches the end of its 90 days without the balance being paid, it marks the request Failed.

This is worth being precise about, because the word is misleading and nothing on screen explains it:

Failed means the app stopped asking. It does not mean the debt is gone.

The patient still owes the money. The request still counts as outstanding, the payment link still works, and you can still collect against it at the front desk. All that has ended is the automatic chasing. A Failed request is your cue to pick up the phone, not to write the balance off.

For the other statuses and what they mean, see Payment Request Statuses.

Putting a Failed request back into collection

If you want AutoCollect to start chasing a Failed request again, open it and click Restart Collection, which sits where the AutoCollect toggle would normally be. That gives the request a fresh 90-day window and moves it back to Sent.

Before it does anything, a confirmation window tells you what the last attempt actually achieved, including the useful case where it turns out no reminders were ever sent because the patient had no email address or mobile number on file. Restarting without fixing that buys another 90 days of silence, so it is worth reading.

Changing the status by hand does not restart collection

Switching a Failed request back to Sent with the Status dropdown only changes the label. The collection window has already run out, so the request goes straight back to Failed and nothing tells you. Use Restart Collection instead.

The full walkthrough, including how to read the confirmation window, is in Restart a Failed Payment Request.

When the toggle disappears

The AutoCollect toggle is not always on the page. It is hidden when:

• The request has been paid or cancelled, so there is nothing left to chase.
• The request is Failed. The Restart Collection button takes the toggle’s place, because a failed request needs a fresh collection window rather than a switch flipped. See above.
• The request has a payment plan on it. Adding a plan switches AutoCollect off automatically, so the patient is never chased by two systems at once. Nothing announces this, the toggle simply goes away, and the plan’s own reminders take over. See Setting Up a Payment Plan.

Turning it on for the whole office

Rather than setting each request individually, set the default once:

1. Open your settings. Click your name in the top right, then Settings under Office.
2. Find the scheduler. Look for AutoCollect Scheduler.
3. Switch it on. Every payment request created from then on starts with AutoCollect enabled. You can still switch it off on an individual request.

Reminders that send themselves are the difference between a balance that gets paid and one that quietly ages. Setting the office default once is usually all the setup this needs.