📎 This article includes 1 downloadable practice file ↓
Chasing payments by hand is repetitive. A Power Automate cloud flow can check your invoice list every morning and send reminders for you.
In this article
What you need
- A Microsoft 365 work or school account (Power Automate is included with many plans).
- An Excel file in OneDrive or SharePoint with a formatted table (Ctrl+T) named Invoices: InvoiceNo, Customer, Email, Amount, DueDate, Status, LastReminder.
The flow
- Trigger: Recurrence — every day at 9:00 (set your time zone to India Standard Time).
- List rows present in a table (Excel Online Business) → choose the file and the Invoices table. Set DateTime Format to ISO 8601 so dates are readable.
- Filter array — keep rows where Status is not “Paid” and DueDate is on or before today + 3 days:
@and(not(equals(item()?['Status'],'Paid')), lessOrEquals(item()?['DueDate'], addDays(utcNow(),3,'yyyy-MM-dd'))) - Apply to each filtered row:
- Send an email (V2) to the row’s Email, subject “Payment reminder: invoice [InvoiceNo]”, body with amount and due date.
- Update a row — key column InvoiceNo, set LastReminder to today.
💡 Add a condition so a customer is reminded at most once every 7 days: skip rows where LastReminder is within the last week.
⚠️ Test with your own email in the Email column first. A mistake in the filter can email every customer at once.
Common issues
| Problem | Fix |
|---|---|
| Dates show as numbers like 45000 | Set DateTime Format to ISO 8601 in the List rows action. |
| Only 256 rows read | Turn on Pagination in the action’s settings and raise the threshold. |
| Flow fails on blank rows | Delete empty rows inside the table, or filter them out. |
Other ideas: save email attachments automatically and the 10 types of automation.
📎 Practice files for this article
- 📄Step-by-step flow guidePractice file from the matching course lesson.⬇ TXT · 492 B
Free to use for learning. Files with macros (.bas) are plain text — import them with Alt+F11 → File → Import File, and always test on a copy.
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