Acumatica AR — Dunning Letters Configuration

Dunning in Acumatica is the automated sequence of increasingly firm reminder letters you send customers as their invoices age past due. It is a standard part of the AR module, driven by dunning levels tied to aging buckets — the configuration work is deciding how many levels you want, what each one says, and when the system is allowed to escalate.

How dunning works in Acumatica

The mechanics are straightforward once you see the shape. You define dunning levels — level 1 is a gentle reminder, later levels are progressively firmer — and associate each with a number of days past due. Acumatica walks a customer's open, overdue invoices, works out the highest applicable level based on how far past due the oldest (or configured) balance is, and generates a dunning letter at that level. The letter is a report template you control, so the wording, the invoice list, and the totals are all yours to shape.

There are two broad modes: customer-level dunning (one letter per customer summarising everything overdue) and document-level dunning (assessed per invoice). Customer-level is what most businesses want — a single, clear statement of what is owed — and it is the default mental model for the rest of this article.

Configuring dunning settings

The behaviour is controlled on the AR preferences and the dedicated dunning setup. The settings that shape everything downstream:

• Dunning process type — customer-level vs document-level. Choose before you build levels; switching later changes how letters are grouped.
• Number of dunning levels and the days-past-due threshold for each. Three or four levels is typical: a reminder, a firm notice, a final notice, and optionally a pre-collections warning.
• Which aging buckets count and whether small balances below a threshold are excluded, so you do not chase a customer over a rounding difference.
• Whether the fee is applied at higher levels, if your terms allow a late fee.

Running the process

Dunning runs in two stages. First you generate dunning letters for the customers who qualify, which creates letter records and advances the tracked level. Then you print or email them. Keeping generation and delivery as separate steps is deliberate — it lets you review what will go out before anything reaches a customer, which matters because a dunning letter with a wrong balance damages a relationship faster than almost anything else AR does.

You can run generation on demand or on a schedule. If you schedule it, pick a cadence that matches how you actually collect (weekly or fortnightly is common) and make sure it runs after the day's cash application, so payments received that morning are not dunned that afternoon.

Customising the letter template

Each dunning level points at a report template. The report is where you set tone and content per level — a polite "we noticed" at level 1, a "your account is now seriously overdue" at level 3, plus the list of open documents and the aged total. Because it is a standard Acumatica report, you edit it in Report Designer: adjust the wording, add your remittance details, and pull in the fields you need from the AR data. Keep a distinct template per level rather than one template with conditional text — separate templates are far easier to hand to a non-developer for wording changes.

Common pitfalls

A few things reliably bite teams setting up dunning for the first time:

• Dunning a customer on credit hold or in dispute. Exclude disputed invoices and honour any hold flags, or you will dun customers your account manager is actively negotiating with.
• Ignoring the customer's dunning-eligible flag. Some customers (intercompany, key accounts) should be excluded entirely. Set that at the customer level rather than remembering to skip them each run.
• Time zones and "days past due." Confirm what date the aging uses and that it matches your close calendar, so an invoice does not tip into a higher level a day early.
• No delivery record. If you email letters, keep the sent record so you can prove a customer was notified — useful if the account ever goes to collections.

Wrapping up

Dunning is one of the higher-leverage bits of AR configuration: a small setup — a few levels, sensible thresholds, clear templates — turns overdue-invoice chasing into a scheduled, consistent process instead of an ad-hoc scramble. Get the sequencing right (cash first, then generate), exclude the accounts that should never be dunned, and review the batch before it sends. The rest is wording, and wording is easy to iterate once the plumbing is sound.