An invoice is 60 days overdue and the customer has gone dark

The scenario

An invoice that was due 60 days ago is still unpaid, and your last three reminders — two emails and a voicemail — have gone unanswered. The customer was a reliable payer until now, so the silence is jarring. You are not sure whether to keep sending gentle nudges, pick up the phone again, or treat the account as a problem that needs a harder edge. The temptation is to send a fourth near-identical email and hope this one lands. It will not. At 60 days with no contact, repeating what has already failed simply confirms to the customer that nothing changes when they ignore you.

What's really going on

Sustained silence after a clean payment history almost always means something has shifted — and rarely in your favour. The likely explanations are a cash-flow squeeze the customer is too embarrassed to admit, a dispute they have decided to deal with by avoidance, a change of staff so your emails are now hitting a dead inbox, or genuine financial distress. None of these are solved by waiting. The longer an overdue balance sits untouched, the lower its chance of being paid in full, because you are competing with every other creditor for a shrinking pool of cash. Silence is not neutral; it is the account quietly deteriorating.

Your options

You have several realistic moves, and the right answer is usually a sequence rather than a single choice:

• Change the channel. If email has failed, call — and if calls fail, try a different contact, a posted letter, or a senior person at the customer.
• Change the tone. Stop repeating the friendly first reminder and send a clearly firmer message that names the age of the debt and the next step.
• Issue a formal reminder or pre-demand notice. A short, businesslike letter stating that the account will be escalated if unpaid by a set date.
• Verify the contact details. Confirm you are actually reaching a live, correct person before assuming you are being ignored.

Recommended approach

Make one genuine attempt to reach a human by phone, ideally the person who approves payments rather than reception, and confirm in that call that your contact details are current. If you cannot reach anyone, send a single firm written notice that states the invoice number, the amount, that it is now 60 days overdue, and that the account will be escalated to a formal letter of demand if it is not paid or addressed by a specific date roughly seven days out. Keep the wording factual and professional — no threats, no capital letters, no exaggeration of consequences. Document every attempt with dates and a short note of what was said or sent. That record matters both for your own decision-making and to show, later, that the customer was given fair and reasonable opportunity to respond. For the mechanics of writing that notice, see knowing when to escalate.

What to avoid

Do not send a fourth identical reminder; repetition without consequence trains the customer to ignore you. Do not let frustration tip into conduct that could be seen as harassment or coercion — under general ACCC and ASIC guidance, contact must stay reasonable in frequency and manner. Do not threaten action you are not actually prepared to take, such as warning of court within 48 hours when you have no intention of filing. And do not simply keep waiting in the hope it resolves itself; passive patience at 60 days is how recoverable debts quietly become write-offs.