The Dunning Agent (Beta)

Overview

A dunning campaign is a timer. Day 3, day 7, day 14, the same ladder for everyone. Three things go wrong on the same day:

The customer who has paid on day 8 for two years gets a past due notice on day 3.
An invoice a partial payment already covered gets chased for its full face value.
A customer whose card expired gets “please pay your invoice” instead of a link to fix the card.

The Dunning Agent reads the account first: twelve months of invoices and payments, the disputes, the provider status. Then it acts at the lowest rung that is justified, or does nothing and tells you why.

Beta. Available on request. Contact us for access.This agent acts. It sends email and re-attempts charges, so start with a dry run.

Campaigns and the agent

	Dunning campaign	Dunning Agent
Decides the next step	Fixed attempts and delays	Per customer, re-evaluated every run
Reads payment history	No	Yes, 12 months
Partial payments	Chases the invoice total	Chases the net still owed
Declined card	Same reminder as everyone	Card-fix email plus a retry
Escalates to a human	No	Yes, with a reason

Campaigns are the deterministic floor. The agent is the judgment layer for the accounts where a fixed ladder gets it wrong. Running both is fine.

How it decides

One ordered ladder, re-evaluated from live billing data on every run. The first rung that matches wins.

Every overdue invoice enters at the top and stops at the first rung that matches

The ladder as text

#	Rung	Condition	Disposition
0	Settled	Net due is zero or less	`skip (settled)`
1	Manual hold	A person took the account over	`paused`
2	Disputed	The invoice carries `payment_dispute_lost_at`	`skip (dispute)`
3	Possibly paid	A settled payment landed on this invoice recently	`skip (possibly-paid)`
4	Provider collecting	A PSP is connected and nothing has failed	`skip (provider in-flight)`
5	Failed charge, small	Net below the retry cap, never retried	`retry (auto)`
6	Failed charge, large or exhausted	At or above the cap, or already retried	`loop-in-human (retry)`
7	Materiality	Net at or above the materiality line	`loop-in-human (materiality)`
8	Terminal	Chased the maximum number of times, no result	`loop-in-human (terminal)`
9	Respect the pattern	Reliable habitual lag, still inside it	`wait`
10	No email	No address on the customer record	`skip (no email)`
11	Otherwise	Nothing above matched	`draft (tone)`

Net, never face value. A partial payment leaves an invoice fully pending at its face amount in Lago. The agent chases total_amount_cents - total_paid_amount_cents - credit_notes_amount_cents everywhere: the email, the materiality test, the retry cap.

Who gets chased, and how firmly

Two signals. A campaign confuses them. Pattern decides whether to chase. The median pay lag across a customer’s paid invoices, and whether that lag is consistent. Reliably eight days late and six days overdue is not a collections problem, so the agent waits. Scattered lags mean no pattern to respect, so it chases. Score decides the tone. The on-time rate over the last 12 months, nothing more.

Score	Late on	Tone
`good-payer`	Under 25% of invoices	Gentle
`occasionally-late`	25% to 50%, or under three invoices on record	Neutral
`repeat-late`	Over 50% of invoices	Firm

A customer scored repeat-late who is still inside their usual lag gets wait, not a firm notice. Consistency is not the same as delinquency.

What it can do

Send a reminder. One email per customer per run, itemizing every overdue invoice with its net amount and days overdue.
Retry a failed charge. Only below the retry cap, and only once. It also emails the customer a portal link to fix the card.

It cannot terminate a subscription, suspend service, issue a credit note or a refund, or apply wallet credit. When one of those is the right call, it says so in Slack and stops.

Guardrails

The agent proposes. A policy engine decides and is the only thing that executes, so every limit below lives in code rather than in a prompt.

Gate	Trips when	Result
Defensibility	The action cites no rule and no evidence	Needs approval
Weekly budget	The touch cap for this customer is used up	Held until next run
Deduplication	The same action already went out recently	Held until next run
Blast radius	The action is rated above `low`	Needs approval
Freshness	The invoice was paid or disputed since the decision	Aborted

Freshness re-reads the invoice from Lago in the moment before sending, so an invoice paid between the decision and the send is never chased.

Run it

Three packagings, one decision policy. What changes is where memory lives and how a message goes out.

	Skill	Platform agent	Self-hosted app
Runs in	Claude Desktop or Claude Code	Claude platform	Your infrastructure
Memory	Memory files	A memory store	Postgres
Email	Gmail draft, never sent	Gmail draft, never sent	SMTP send, gated
Failed charge	Drafts, flags a human	Drafts, flags a human	Retries below the cap
Approvals	None	None	Yes

Use the Skill to see the decisions with a person still in the send loop. Use the app when you want it to collect.

Skill
Self-hosted app

Upload the skill folder under Settings → Capabilities → Skills, enable the Gmail and Slack connectors, set your Lago API URL and key, then ask “who owes me money”.It creates Gmail drafts and never sends. Memory lives in one file per customer, holding the score, the payment pattern, the contact history, and any hold. Clear the hold to hand an account back to the agent.

cp .env.template .env          # LAGO_API_URL, LAGO_API_KEY, a model key
python -m app init-db
python -m app sweep --dry-run  # decide and report, no side effects
python -m app sweep            # the real pass
python -m app web              # chat UI on :8000

Review what the gates escalated, then release it:

curl localhost:8000/approvals
curl -XPOST localhost:8000/approvals/<id>/approve

A run is manual, driven from chat, or scheduled hourly. The scheduled sweep is opt-in and off by default. There are no webhook triggers: the work queue is a query on Lago’s own payment_overdue flag, re-derived every run.

Connect and configure

Tool	What it gets you
Lago	The billing truth. Reads invoices, payments, disputes, portal links. One write, in the self-hosted app only: the retry.
SMTP or Gmail	Sending, or drafting for a person to send.
Slack	One alert per run, listing only the accounts a human should see.
Your PSP	Reached through Lago, so it inherits whatever you already connected.
Bedrock or Anthropic	The model backend.

Adding a new action or a new gate is a small extension: an action is a type, a blast radius, an executor, and a freshness check.

Setting	Default	Controls
`MAX_TOUCHES_PER_WEEK`	`2`	Outbound touches per customer per 7 days
`DEDUP_WINDOW_HOURS`	`48`	How long the same action is blocked from repeating
`SCORE_FRESH_DAYS`	`14`	How long a cached score is trusted
`RECENTLY_PAID_DAYS`	`14`	The possibly-paid lookback window
`MATERIALITY_CENTS`	`1000000`	Net due that goes to a human. Default $10,000
`TERMINAL_TOUCHES`	`3`	Touches with no result before handing off
`RETRY_AUTO_CAP_CENTS`	`200000`	Failed charges below this are auto-retried. Default $2,000
`SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL`	none	Where the alert goes

The ladder order, the email templates, and the score thresholds are not settings. Changing them is a code change.

When it hands off

One Slack message per run, ordered by urgency. Each line says what happened, what to do, and how automation resumes.

Reason	What to do
Materiality	The account owner reaches out personally
Terminal	Call, offer a payment plan, or consider collections
Retry	A card-fix email went out. Check the card or retry
Dispute	Resolve the dispute before any collection
Possibly paid	Verify and reconcile before chasing
Manual hold	Nothing. A person already owns it

wait and cadence holds are not alerted. They resolve themselves.

Limits

Every run sweeps every overdue customer, not only the ones that are due.
The scheduled sweep is opt-in and off by default.
Emails are plain text. No HTML templates, no branding.
The ladder is deterministic, but the wording of a reminder is AI-generated. Read a dry run before trusting it unattended.

Automatic dunning: rule-based dunning campaigns.
Payment retries: retry collection on a single invoice.
Billing Assistant: run billing operations in natural language.

Introduction

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Resources

The Dunning Agent (Beta)

Overview

Campaigns and the agent

How it decides

Who gets chased, and how firmly

What it can do

Guardrails

Run it

Connect and configure

When it hands off

Limits

​Overview

​Campaigns and the agent

​How it decides

​Who gets chased, and how firmly

​What it can do

​Guardrails

​Run it

​Connect and configure

​When it hands off

​Limits

​Related

Overview

Campaigns and the agent

How it decides

Who gets chased, and how firmly

What it can do

Guardrails

Run it

Connect and configure

When it hands off

Limits

Related