The balance is due and nobody has paid. What do you send, and when?

Last checked 20 September 2026

A balance gets paid when the traveller already believed the due date at the moment they paid the deposit, when the message names a consequence that was written down before it was needed, and when the chase starts a week before the due date rather than a week after it. Three touches carry almost all of it: one seven days out, one on the due date, one three days late. Thrivia automates exactly those three by email, at due_minus_7, due_day and due_plus_3, and then it stops. It never cancels a booking and it never moves money, so the decision about an overdue seat stays with you. Nothing sends a WhatsApp message off a due date on its own, so the WhatsApp half is either a person in the inbox or a campaign you build yourself against a filtered slice of your CRM leads.

You took a deposit in October for a Dec departure. The balance was due a week ago. Four people have paid, three have not, one of them has read every message and answered none of them, and you are about to send a vehicle advance against a headcount you cannot actually confirm. The question is not how to word a polite nudge. It is what happens on the day after the last nudge, and whether you decided that before or after the money failed to arrive.

Sizing the deposit and choosing the due date are a separate job, worked through in how much deposit to take and how to collect the balance. This page starts after that: the date exists, it has passed, and the seat is still half paid.

Three things get a balance paid, and two of them happened months ago

Almost everything that decides whether a balance arrives on time was settled at the moment the deposit was taken. By the time you are writing the reminder, you are working with what you set up in October.

• The traveller believed the date when they paid the deposit. A due date that appears for the first time in a reminder is a request. A due date that was on the confirmation they received the minute they paid is a term. The difference shows up in the reply: people argue with requests and pay terms.
• The consequence was written before it was needed. "The seat goes back on sale" only works if it was written down when nobody was in breach of it. Invented in the third reminder, it reads as a threat and gets treated as one, and the traveller who has known you two seasons knows you have never once released a seat.
• The chase started before the due date. A first contact that arrives after the deadline has already conceded the deadline. A week of notice is what someone needs to move money between accounts, ask a partner, or get paid themselves.

What is left for the reminder itself is narrow, and that is the point. It has to say the amount, the date, one tap to pay, and what happens if it does not arrive. Everything past those four is decoration, and decoration is what gets skimmed.

How operators run a balance chase today

The deposit half works. Somebody paid, you have their name, the seat is theirs. Then the departure gets closer and the chase happens across a sheet, a chat list and your memory of who said what.

What the automated chase actually is, and what channel it uses

The automated reminder in Thrivia goes out by email. The job that sends it calls the mailer and nothing else. If you searched for a WhatsApp balance reminder and arrived here, that is the answer to the first question worth asking: the scheduled, hands-off part of this is email, and the WhatsApp part is a person. The section below that one covers the WhatsApp half honestly.

The job runs hourly and sweeps three stages in order.

Three and then silence is a design decision, not a gap. The job never cancels a booking, never forfeits a deposit and never moves money. The only two writes it makes are the reminder claim and the past-due flag. What to do about a seat that is three weeks overdue is a judgement about a person you may have met, and it stays with you.

Each reminder is claimed before it is sent. The job writes the stage key onto the booking with a filter that requires the key to be absent, and it sends only if that write is the one that changed the document. Two overlapping runs cannot both win that transition, so each booking gets each stage at most once regardless of how many hourly passes its window spans. It is the claim that enforces once-only, not the timing.

• The sweep is bounded. 50 bookings a page, and never more than 500 claims per stage per run. A backlog drains across runs instead of one pass trying to send to an unbounded cohort.
• Cancelled and refunded bookings are excluded. A booking that was cancelled through the normal flow can leave a stale deposit-paid rollup behind, and without that exclusion the traveller would keep hearing that their balance is due.
• The default due date is 14 days before departure, set per event and overridable. The reminder offsets hang off whatever you set, so a 25-day due date puts the notice at day 32.
• The pay link is a signed, expiring, single-booking link that stays alive until the due date plus a month, so a link minted in October for a balance due in December still works in December. A booking six months out was the case that broke a fixed 30-day link.
• A booking with no email address still gets its stage claimed and simply sends nothing, which keeps the sweep terminating. That one is worth knowing if you import bookings with phone numbers only.

The WhatsApp half, and why it is a person

An email is a record more than it is a nudge, and a traveller who has stopped answering one is rarely reading the other. So the practical shape is the automated email underneath, doing the record-keeping and the on-time notice, and WhatsApp on top for the two or three people it comes down to. Nothing sends a WhatsApp message off a balance due date on its own. The WhatsApp side is a person, or a sequence you built yourself.

What exists on the WhatsApp side is two things.

1. The inbox. Replies from Instagram, WhatsApp and your site land in one place, and you can send from it. A lead who has messaged you in the last 24 hours can be sent free text. A lead who has never written to you cannot be, by Meta's rule rather than ours, so a cold first message has to be an approved template, and where you have no template the product hands back a wa.me link and records the send as something you said happened rather than something it saw happen.
2. A campaign, under the AI DM add-on. You filter your CRM to a slice and build a ladder of up to ten steps, each one an approved template, each timed either from when the person entered the campaign or from the step before it. A one-off campaign freezes its audience at activation. An evergreen one keeps enrolling, on a cursor that runs every fifteen minutes, so people who go quiet after you switched it on are picked up rather than missed.

A campaign will run a real timed sequence, which means you can build the balance chase you want on WhatsApp instead of accepting the three email stages as the whole of it. Sends are held to a window, 9am to 8pm IST by default and measured in the recipient's own day rather than India's, with a frequency cap so one person is not hit by two campaigns in the same afternoon.

One limit decides whether any of it is usable for a balance chase. The audience is a filtered slice of leads, meaning people who enquired through a channel or arrived through a CRM import. A traveller who booked straight off your page without ever messaging you may have no lead row to filter on, and no campaign can reach somebody who is not in the audience it is built from. Check that before you design a sequence around it.

A stop is recorded once and fans out. It exits every active enrolment and cancels every queued send for that person, and the record survives a lapsed add-on or a global kill switch, because the one message that must never be missed is somebody telling you to stop. The keyword rule is deliberately narrow: a whole message of about three words or fewer that is essentially the word. "Stop sending me the wrong dates" is a complaint about your sequence and stays in your inbox rather than silently unsubscribing the person who wrote it.

Where the handling fee lands when a payment is split

Operators ask this one in the same breath as the chase, because it decides what the balance link should actually charge. In gateway mode Thrivia's handling fee is 4.9%, it already contains its own tax so nothing adds tax on top of it, and it is applied last on the tax-inclusive subtotal rather than on the bare ticket. On a split booking it is divided across the two halves in the same ratio as the ticket, so both the deposit and the balance carry a share of it, and the two shares add back to what a single charge would have cost.

Splitting the payment does not add a handling fee, because the fee is a percentage with no fixed component. Where your gateway charges a flat amount per transaction as well, you pay that flat amount twice, and the arithmetic for that is on the deposit and balance page. Whether the 4.9% comes off your revenue or is added to what the traveller pays is a per-event setting, and in manual mode, where the traveller pays your own UPI ID directly, there is no handling fee at all.

The seat is still unpaid a week later

Past the third reminder there is no mechanism left, which means there is a decision. Three of them, in order of how much they cost you.

• Release the seat and keep the deposit, under the refund tier the booking was sold under. This is the only one that gets your headcount true before the vendor advances go out, and it is the one you can only take if the consequence was written down in October.
• Extend, once, with a date and in writing. Defensible when the traveller has answered and given you a reason. It stops being defensible the second time, and everyone in a group booking finds out about the first.
• Carry them and hope. Occasionally right for somebody who has travelled with you four times. Expensive as a default, because you are now paying a homestay against a headcount that includes a seat nobody has paid for.

For a Dec or Jan departure with deposits taken in October, that decision lands in the same fortnight as your first non-refundable payment, which is what makes the written consequence worth the twenty minutes it takes to write. Winter batches are also the ones where a released seat can still be resold, and a seat released in departure week cannot.

How the surrounding pieces fit together, the deposit and the balance and the seat count against one departure, is the subject of booking software for tour operators and, for fixed-departure batches specifically, software for trek organisers. Thrivia is priced as a monthly subscription with a booking allowance rather than a cut of each payment, so chasing a balance twice does not cost you anything on this side of it. Plans are on pricing.