Key terms in this article
What is credit control?
Credit control is the UK term for the work of getting paid on time. It covers payment terms, chasing overdue invoices, putting accounts on hold and deciding when to stop supplying a customer.
What is a dunning letter?
A dunning letter is a written reminder that an invoice is overdue. In a staged sequence, each letter is firmer than the last. UK businesses usually just call these reminders or chasers.
What is aged debt?
Aged debt is money owed to you, grouped by how overdue it is. It is the report most credit control work is driven from.
What Is Dunning?
Dunning is the process of chasing customers for overdue payments using a planned sequence of reminders. Each reminder goes out at a set interval and each one is firmer in tone than the one before.
It is worth knowing straight away that dunning is now mainly an American business word. If you have arrived here after meeting it in a piece of billing or subscription software, that is almost certainly why. UK finance teams do the same work and call it credit control.
The word is older than the software. The verb “to dun”, meaning to press someone for payment, dates from the 17th century, though where it came from is uncertain (Collins, 2026). It survived in American business usage and largely fell out of British usage, which is why Cambridge now marks this sense as US business English (Cambridge, 2026). It came back to us through software built in the United States.
Key Takeaways
- Dunning means chasing overdue invoices with a planned, escalating sequence of reminders
- It is the reminder part of what UK businesses call credit control
- The term arrives here mainly through American billing and subscription software
- In UK conversation, say credit control; you will be understood immediately
- Three or four contacts over about 60 days is what we usually see, but match it to the debt and the customer
- Consistency matters far more than severity
- Failed card payments in subscription businesses have their own version, sometimes called dunning management
Should You Use the Word?
In writing aimed at a UK audience, mostly not. Two practical reasons.
Your customers will not recognise it. A UK finance manager who receives an email referring to your dunning process will pause on the word. Anything that makes an overdue-invoice email harder to read works against you.
Your colleagues may not either. If you are writing an internal process document, credit control is the term that everyone in a UK business already understands.
Where it does earn its place is in technical contexts. If you are configuring software that labels the feature dunning, or writing for an audience of billing specialists, use the word the system uses. Fighting your own software’s vocabulary helps nobody.
We take the same line on our own product pages. The credit control feature keeps dunning in the title because that is what a technical buyer searches for, and uses credit control everywhere a customer might read it.
What a Dunning Process Actually Looks Like
Whatever you call it, the shape is consistent. Here is an example for a UK business on 30-day terms. It is a working pattern, not a legal timetable:
- A few days before due date. A courtesy note that the invoice is due shortly. Optional, and it does more work than most people expect.
- Day 1 to 3 overdue. A short, friendly reminder. Assume it was an oversight, because usually it was.
- Around day 14 overdue. A firmer note. State the amount, the original due date, and how to pay. Ask for a payment date if they cannot pay now.
- Around day 30 overdue. A phone call, not an email. This is where written reminders stop working and a conversation starts. Check for a dispute or a payment problem, and for any sign the customer is in difficulty, before you escalate.
- Around day 45 to 60. A formal notice setting out what happens next, whether that is an account hold, a payment plan or referral.
Two things make this work, and neither is the wording.
The intervals must be fixed. Customers learn your pattern. If your day-14 reminder always arrives on day 14, they start paying on day 12. If it arrives whenever someone remembers, they learn that your dates are negotiable.
The escalation must be real. If your final notice threatens an account hold, the hold has to happen. One empty threat teaches a customer that all of them are empty.
From our experience: the number of touchpoints predicts recovery better than the severity of the wording does. We have watched customers agonise over the tone of a second reminder when the thing actually holding them back was that there was no third one. A polite sequence that always completes beats a stern sequence that peters out after two emails.
Dunning in Subscription Billing
There is a second, narrower meaning of the word, and it causes some confusion.
In subscription and card-payment businesses, dunning management often refers specifically to handling failed recurring payments. A card expires, the payment fails, and the system retries it on a schedule while emailing the customer to update their details.
That is a genuinely different problem from chasing an invoice. The customer usually intends to pay and something technical has broken. The right response is retries and a card-update prompt, not an escalating demand for money.
If you run both models, keep them separate. Sending a firmly worded overdue notice to a customer whose card simply expired is a good way to lose a customer who was never a credit risk.
What This Means in the UK Specifically
Two things shape credit control here that American material on dunning will not mention.
You have a statutory right to interest. Under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, you can charge 8% above the Bank of England base rate on an overdue commercial debt (GOV.UK, 2026), plus a fixed recovery sum of £40, £70 or £100 depending on the size of the debt (GOV.UK, 2026). A rate set in your own contract displaces it, except with a public authority, where you cannot go below the statutory rate. The rate comes from the 30 June or 31 December before the debt went overdue rather than from today’s rate, so our late payment interest calculator works it out from the due date.
Knowing the number and charging it are different decisions. Across our own reseller customers, it tends to be held in reserve for accounts in dispute rather than applied routinely, and we think they are right to. That argument is set out in full on the product site in why statutory interest rarely works.
The rules may tighten. The Commercial Payments Bill would cap standard commercial terms at 60 days, with narrow exemptions, and give the Small Business Commissioner real enforcement powers. It went to Parliament in May 2026 and is not law yet, and the government has said it will not apply to past payments (GOV.UK, 2026). We covered the detail in our King’s Speech update.
The context is worth keeping in view. Late payment costs the UK economy around £11 billion a year, with roughly £26 billion owed to small businesses at any one time (King’s Speech 2026 background briefing notes, 2026).
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between dunning and credit control?
In practice, very little. Dunning usually refers to the specific act of sending escalating payment reminders, while credit control covers the whole discipline, including setting terms, assessing customer risk, account holds and write-off decisions. Dunning is best thought of as one part of credit control. The bigger difference is regional: dunning is the American term and credit control is the British one.
Is dunning a rude or aggressive word?
No, though it sounds harsher to British ears than it is meant to. It simply means demanding payment, and it carries no legal or aggressive weight. The reason to avoid it in UK customer communications is unfamiliarity rather than offence. Most UK recipients will not immediately know what it means.
How many dunning letters should I send?
There is no legal number. Across the resellers we work with, three or four contacts across roughly 60 days is the usual pattern, with at least one being a phone call rather than an email. What matters more than the count is that the intervals are fixed and the sequence always finishes. We would take a predictable three-step process over an unpredictable five-step one. Record every attempt, make the next step clear, and look at the account properly before doing anything stronger. Consumer debts and regulated services need extra care.
Doing It Without Doing It By Hand
A staged sequence only works if it actually runs every time, which is hard to sustain manually once you have more than a handful of overdue accounts.
That is the job of the credit control side of our CRM. It sweeps the invoice ledger every day to build the worklist, so nothing quietly falls off the bottom of somebody’s list. Before anything goes out, it checks the account is still eligible, so a customer who has just paid is not chased.
Chasing is one stage of a wider routine. Our guide to the credit control process covers the other four, and the report most of this work runs from is explained in our guide to the aged debt report. If you would rather talk it through, the contact form is the way in.