The complete guide
Chasing fees is the job everyone at an academy quietly hates, so it gets done late, unevenly, and in whoever's personal WhatsApp was nearest. This guide explains how automated WhatsApp and email reminders should behave — firm, never spammy, from your own number — and exactly how Tensionmukti's reminder engine decides who to message, when, and when to stay silent.
The problem
Every institute starts with good intentions: a list, a rota, a promise to call every overdue parent this week. Then admissions season lands, the one person who maintained the list goes on leave, and by the time anyone looks again there is ₹80,000 of quietly aged money and no record of who was last asked, when, or by whom. The failure is not laziness — it is that reminding is a daily, boring, interrupt-driven job, and humans are structurally bad at exactly that shape of work.
Machines are structurally good at it. The correct division of labour is: the software sends the routine nudges, every day, without being asked — and your people spend their time on the conversations that actually need a human: the parent with a genuine problem, the promise to pay worth recording, the relationship worth keeping.
The engine
Every day, the engine sweeps every instalment that is uncancelled, has a balance above zero, and is due today or already past. Each candidate is classed by the calendar: due soon — the due date has arrived but the batch's grace days have not run out — or overdue, past due date plus grace. The message says which, names the instalment, states the exact outstanding balance, and carries a payment link.
Hi Sneha, Instalment 2 of 5 — ₹6,000 — was due on 23 July.
rzp.io/i/aXbY2z
10:30 ✓✓
Sent from your Interakt account. Escalates once, then waits three days.
Three rules keep the tone right, and they are the heart of the design:
The channels
Reminders send over WhatsApp through your own Interakt account and email through your own SMTP — never from a shared Tensionmukti pool. That matters twice over. Parents see your institute's name and number, which is who they actually have a relationship with. And your sending reputation stays yours: no other academy's behaviour can get your number rate-limited, and leaving Tensionmukti costs you nothing on this axis because the accounts were always your own.
Every send is recorded per instalment and per channel, and each daily run writes one audit line with its counts — so "did we remind them?" is a lookup, not an argument. The same history shows staff-logged calls, promises to pay with dates, and the student's own messages from their portal: the entire collections conversation, one student at a time, in one place.
Beyond the nudge
A parent says the fifth, after salary. Record it: open promises surface on their date, and kept versus broken becomes visible per student.
Students see their own schedule and pay open instalments themselves — which quietly answers most of the calls before they happen.
Outstanding money ages into buckets, so the team's phone time goes to the oldest and largest balances first, not whoever called last.
The moment a reminder converts, the receipt email and GST invoice go out automatically — closing the loop the nudge opened.
Backed-out students and written-off instalments leave the reminder population instantly. The system never chases money you have let go.
Every send, every logged call, every promise — with who, when, and what. The full trail is one click from the student.
Getting started
Paste your Interakt API key into Settings → Integrations. Encrypted at rest, used only to send on your behalf.
Your SMTP host and credentials, the same way. Receipts and password resets use the same connection.
Per batch: how long after the due date you wait before a student counts as overdue. The escalation follows your setting.
The daily schedule is already running. From the first connected channel onward, due and overdue instalments are chased without anyone remembering to.
Reminders are one part of the collection machine — the schedule they chase is built at enrolment (how instalment plans work), and every payment they convert is invoiced with the right tax split (how GST invoicing is decided). For the whole system in one view, start with the buyer's guide to fee management software.
Questions
Yours. Tensionmukti sends through your own Interakt (WhatsApp Business API) account, so parents see your institute's name and number — and your sending reputation belongs to you. Email reminders likewise go through your own SMTP. We never send from a shared pool.
The engine runs daily, but a daily run does not mean a daily message. Each instalment, per channel, has a three-day cooldown — with exactly one override: the day it tips from due-soon to overdue, a message goes out immediately, because that change of state is worth one. This is the difference between a system parents act on and one they block.
Every reminder carries one when Razorpay is connected: the instalment's name, the exact outstanding balance, the due date, and a link that opens straight into payment. The nudge and the way to act on it arrive in the same message — which is where most of the collection lift comes from.
Collections staff log phone calls into the same per-student history, so the whole conversation — automated and human — reads in one place. Deliberately, a logged call does not silence the automation: a personal call and a machine nudge are different conversations, and one never suppresses the other.
No. The engine only ever considers uncancelled instalments with a live balance. The moment a student is backed out or an instalment is written off, it leaves the reminder population — chasing money you have already written off is how institutes end up in parents' blocked lists.
An Interakt account for WhatsApp (your own), SMTP credentials for email (your own), pasted once into Settings → Integrations, encrypted at rest. The daily schedule is already running server-side; connecting a channel is the on switch. No developer required.
Keep reading
What it should actually do for an Indian education business, and how to judge one.
Read the guideTurning an agreed fee into a schedule that collects itself, without a lender in the middle.
Read the guideCGST, SGST, IGST and sequential invoice numbers, decided per student, automatically.
Read the guideConnect your own WhatsApp and email once, and the chasing runs daily without you — firm, polite, and recorded. Your team keeps the conversations that need a human.