u/Lower-Kale-6677

Hey everyone,

I’ve been building a payment follow-up workflow and wanted some honest feedback on the architecture and logic from people with more automation experience.

The workflow currently:

• reads invoice data from a spreadsheet
• validates unpaid invoices
• calculates reminder stages based on due dates
• sends progressively firmer reminder emails
• prevents duplicate reminders
• escalates long-overdue invoices
• sends team alerts for failures/escalations
• tracks reminder history back into the data source

I intentionally tried to keep it relatively lean instead of turning it into a giant multi-agent system.

A few things I’m unsure about:

1. Is a spreadsheet-based setup a reasonable source of truth at small scale, or does this become painful quickly?
2. Would you handle escalation logic differently?
3. Is there a cleaner way to manage staged email templates without creating visual chaos?
4. At what point would you move something like this into a proper database?
5. Any common failure points or edge cases I should anticipate in reminder/escalation workflows?
6. How would you approach dispute detection/reply handling in a cleaner way?

Would appreciate any technical or operational feedback from people who’ve built similar workflows.