An arrear handled on day 5 usually resolves amicably. The same arrear discovered on day 45 becomes a litigation file. The whole difference is process — not the firmness of tone, but the regularity of the steps and the written trace of each one.
The standard escalation ladder
Every manager has variants, but the structure that works looks like this:
- Day 3–5 — simple reminder. A neutral email or SMS: the period's rent doesn't show as settled, please check. Most delays stop here (forgotten transfer, bank change).
- Day 10 — formal reminder. A letter or email restating the amount due, the due date and the lease clause. Explicitly offer a payment plan if the situation calls for it.
- Day 20–30 — mise en demeure. Registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt. This is what starts interest running and conditions everything after it; without it, the next step is fragile.
- Day 40 and beyond — escalation. A commandement de payer served by a judicial officer (mandatory before invoking the lease's termination clause), plus notification of the guarantor.
Mind the GLI deadline: if the lease is covered by rent-guarantee insurance, the claim declaration does not follow this ladder — most policies require it within 15 to 30 days (often from the second unpaid term), on pain of forfeiting the guarantee. The policy's deadline always overrides the reminder calendar.
Two rules cut across all steps: never skip a stage without a written trace of the previous one, and always check for partial payments before chasing — dunning a tenant who paid yesterday costs more in trust than the arrear itself.
Why portfolios lose track
For a single lease this process is trivial. Across 300 leases it is not: every file sits at a different stage, partial payments blur the amounts, and the tracking spreadsheet depends on one person. Arrears "discovered at day 45" are almost always arrears that were noted somewhere, then forgotten.
How Lizops handles it
Lizops ranks the Collect queue by amount × age: the most expensive file is always on top. Each file shows its evidence before any action — unpaid due dates, reminders already sent and their status, the lease's termination (résolutoire) clause — and proposes the next step of the ladder, never a skipped one. Every reminder sent, every payment recorded, every escalation is written to the audit log.
The manager no longer hunts for who to chase: they open the morning queue and work down the list.