The Aged Receivables reports
Xero has two reports that answer most receivables questions.
- Aged Receivables Summary shows each contact’s balance by age: current, then one, two and three months or older. You can change the periods. Use it to see where money is stuck.
- Aged Receivables Detail lists every open invoice with dates and amounts. Use it to plan the week.
One setting matters more than the rest: age by due date, not invoice date, when you’re planning follow-up. An invoice raised 40 days ago on 30-day terms is 10 days late, not 40. Reminding a customer on the wrong basis is how polite businesses end up sounding pushy.
Before you chase anything, check for payments sitting unreconciled in the bank feed. A deposit that matches an invoice but hasn’t been reconciled leaves the invoice showing as owed.
What Xero’s reminders do
Xero can send automatic reminder emails for overdue invoices, set up under invoice reminders (Xero Central: how invoice reminders work). Only invoices marked as sent get them. For a business with a few customers who are sometimes late, it may be all you need, and it costs nothing extra.
As of November 2026, a third-party explainer from Paidnice (which sells a Xero collections add-on, so read it with that in mind) describes Xero’s built-in reminders this way:
| Feature | Xero’s built-in reminders, per that source |
|---|---|
| Channel | Email only |
| Number of reminders | Up to five |
| Schedules | One for the whole organisation |
| Late fees or interest | None |
| After the last reminder | No escalation |
Check Xero’s current settings for yourself; products change. The bigger gap isn’t in that table, though. Replies come back to your inbox, and what happens next is up to you.
One schedule for everyone
A single schedule treats every customer the same. Real customers aren’t the same:
- A long-standing client who always pays on day 40 because of their payment run gets reminded on day 31, every month, and finds it slightly insulting.
- A new customer who has never paid you gets the same gentle sequence as everyone else, when they probably need a nudge on day one.
- A customer who told you last week that the invoice is in Friday’s run gets reminded on Thursday anyway.
You can work around this by switching reminders off for particular contacts and chasing those by hand. That works at 20 customers. At 200, it becomes the job you were trying to avoid.
Getting contacts right
Every reminder is only as good as the address it goes to. In Xero, each contact can hold a primary person and additional people who receive invoices. Before you automate anything:
- Add an accounts payable address for every business customer that has one. AP teams pay invoices; project contacts forward them, eventually.
- Remove people who have left. A bounce or an out-of-office from someone who left in March is a reminder that went nowhere.
- Put PO numbers on invoices for customers who require them. “Can you resend with the PO?” is a reply AR teams see often, and an easy one to prevent.
Adding collections on top of Xero
Collections tools for Xero fall into two groups. Some add more channels and rules: SMS, letters, late fees, payment plans. Others focus on the conversation: writing each reminder for the situation and handling the replies. Paidnice and Chaser are well-known examples of the first; we compare both fairly on our Paidnice and Chaser pages.
OnDue is in the second group. You connect Xero from OnDue and it imports open invoices and contacts, then syncs every 15 minutes. It drafts a reminder for each overdue invoice and you approve or skip every one. Every reply is sorted: a promise to pay holds that invoice until the date, a dispute or question pauses it and comes to you, “paid already” pauses it for you to check. Payments you reconcile in Xero stop the reminders.
Whichever way you go, keep Xero as the record. A collections tool that needs you to reconcile a second ledger has added work, not removed it.
Where OnDue stops today
OnDue is in early access. On Xero it doesn’t yet:
- Take payments. A card and ACH pay page, with the payment written back to the invoice in Xero, is Coming soon
- Write to Xero. It only reads today.
- Vary the schedule. Early-access accounts run one standard cadence (days 1, 7, 14 and 30 after due), so the “one schedule for everyone” problem above isn’t solved yet; you can stop chasing a customer or invoice instead. Custom cadences are coming soon.
- Send SMS, WhatsApp or letters, or charge late fees. Paidnice and Chaser do some of these today.
- Send without approval. Every reminder waits for a person.
Sources
- Xero Central: How invoice reminders work
- Paidnice: Xero invoice reminders explained (a Xero add-on vendor; read November 2026)