Set up automatic invoice reminders in Xero

The short answer

Xero's invoice reminders are off by default. Turn them on from the Sales menu: open Invoices, click Invoice Reminders: Off, and tick Email customers when an invoice is. That starts Xero's three stock reminders at 7, 14 and 21 days overdue. You can edit them, add up to five in total, and set some to send before the due date. Reminders only go to contacts with an email address, only for invoices marked as sent, and replies land at one editable address. The steps below cover the schedule, the wording, the exclusions and putting a Pay Now button one click from the email.

How Xero decides whether to email your customer

Xero has invoice reminders built in, and most businesses I look at have never switched them on. The feature is off by default, so every overdue invoice waits for you to remember it personally. Once it's on, Xero sends reminders once a day between 4am and 8am in your organisation's time zone, for any invoice that's been marked as sent and matches one of your reminder rules.

The design catch is that reminders are controlled at three levels: a master switch for the organisation, a flag on each customer, and a flag on each invoice. All of them have to agree before an email goes out, which is why the most common complaint is that reminders aren't sending, and why the fix is usually one unticked box. The other quiet failure is a contact record with no email address; Xero can't chase someone it can't write to.

Even when they work, the defaults are generic. Xero ships three reminders, all after the due date, at 7, 14 and 21 days overdue. One flat overdue notice repeated three times doesn't do much for a client who's simply forgotten, and does even less for one who's stringing you along. You'll fix the schedule in step 2 and the wording in step 3.

1. Turn the master switch on

You need the advisor or standard user role. In the Sales menu, select Invoices, then click the button labelled Invoice Reminders: Off. Tick Email customers when an invoice is, then click Save. That's the whole switch: Xero's three stock reminders start going out for every invoice marked as sent. (The same panel is also reachable through Sales settings, then Invoice settings, then Invoice Reminders.)

Timing matters more than you'd expect. Reminders go out between 4am and 8am. Turn the switch on before 4am and that day's reminders send the same day; turn it on after 8am and they start the following morning.

2. Build the chase, including one before the due date

In the same panel, click Add reminder. The dropdown Send if an invoice is gives you two choices: due in sends before the due date, overdue by sends after it. Enter the number of days either side, or 0 to send on the day the invoice is due. You can have up to five reminders in total.

The pre-due reminder is the one most people skip and the one that does the most good, because most late payers haven't decided not to pay you, they've just lost the invoice. A schedule I'd start with:

due in 3 days        friendly heads-up
overdue by 7 days    polite nudge, assume they've forgotten
overdue by 14 days   firmer, ask for a payment date
overdue by 21 days   last email before a phone call

3. Rewrite the wording so it escalates

Each reminder has its own email template, so edit all of them rather than sending the same flat message four times. Put your cursor where you want a live detail, click Insert placeholder and pick from the list; Xero fills in the real invoice values when it sends.

Make the tone climb. The heads-up is warm and mentions the date. Seven days assumes an oversight and makes paying easy. Fourteen days asks them to reply with a payment date. Twenty-one days says plainly what happens next. Write them the way you'd write them yourself, because your customer will assume you did.

One option in this panel applies to every reminder at once: tick Include a link to the invoice PDF if your customers like having the document to hand. The minimum-amount setting lives here too, covered next.

4. Decide who never gets chased

Tick Don't send reminders for amounts owing on an invoice under and enter an amount, so a customer with 40p outstanding after a rounding difference doesn't get four stern emails. The threshold applies to all reminders.

To exempt a whole customer (a big client with their own payment run, say, or someone mid-dispute): in the Contacts menu, select Customers, open the contact, click the menu icon and choose Turn off invoice reminders. For a single invoice: in the Sales menu, select Invoices, open the Awaiting Payment tab, tick the invoice, then click More and Turn reminders off. The menu icon on an open invoice does the same job.

Write down anywhere you switch these off. Silenced flags are the usual answer, months later, to the question of why a customer was never chased.

5. Point replies at an inbox someone reads

Customer replies go to the login email of whoever first turned reminders on, which is fine until that person changes role or leaves. Set it deliberately: click your organisation name, then Settings, then Email settings. Next to Email address, click Edit, then Add email address, and enter the reply-to address and the email name customers will see. A new address has to be approved from an invitation email, and the invitation expires after 14 days, so warn whoever owns that inbox.

Every email Xero sends comes from one fixed address, shown below, and you can't change it. Two catches. If a customer starts a fresh email to that address instead of replying, it never reaches your reply-to address and the customer isn't told it failed. And while everything Xero sends arrives from Xero's domain, the rest of the chase (your replies and anything else you send from your own inbox) goes out as your domain, and if your SPF and DKIM aren't right, those are the messages that land in spam. My guide at lodesa.co.uk/library/spf-dkim-dmarc-setup covers that end.

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6. Let the reminder be paid on the spot

A reminder works far better when the money is one click away. First connect a payment service: in the Sales menu, select Online payments, open the Add a new service tab, pick a provider and follow the sign-up or sign-in steps. Stripe, GoCardless and PayPal can also be connected straight from a draft or approved invoice (next to Online payments, click Add).

Then attach it to your invoice template: still in Online payments, open the Connected services tab, click Manage themes (or Manage branding themes), select the provider under the template you use, and Save. Invoices on that template now show a Pay Now button on the online invoice, and customers don't need a Xero login to use it.

Back in the reminder settings, tick Include button to online invoice and detail summary. Every reminder then carries the link to the online invoice plus the amount due, due date and invoice ID in the email header. Two facts worth knowing: the provider might charge fees for the service, which you pay them directly and separately from your Xero subscription; and when a customer pays online, Xero marks the invoice as paid but doesn't send you an alert.

Where this gets hard

The classic failure is reminders that silently don't send. Five things have to be true at once: the organisation switch is on, the customer's flag hasn't been turned off, the invoice's flag hasn't been turned off, the invoice is marked as sent, and the contact has an email address. When one of them isn't, Xero doesn't point at it; you check each in turn, invoice by invoice, and the culprit is usually a flag somebody set months ago for a reason nobody remembers.

The timing rules bite too. Reminders that fall due while the switch is off never catch up, even if you change the invoice's due date, and turning the switch off between 4am and 8am drops that day's run entirely. So pausing reminders for the whole organisation while you sort things out with one customer, instead of using that customer's own flag, quietly swallows every reminder that should have gone out in the meantime, with nothing to tell you it happened.

And the machine has no judgement. It will cheerfully send a fourth nudge to a customer who's disputing the work, or to one who agreed a payment plan on the phone yesterday, unless a human remembers the right flag at the right moment. There's a point in every overdue account where the next step is a call, not another template, and no setting knows where that point is. The setup above is worth doing regardless; it's the operating of it, week in and week out, that businesses tend to drop.

What you end up with

• Reminders switched on and actually sending, with every blocking flag checked
• A tiered chase in your own words, from a heads-up before the due date to a firm 21-day notice
• Replies landing in an inbox someone reads, not a former employee's login
• A Pay Now button one click from every reminder, so paying is easier than ignoring you

Facts on this page last checked 14 July 2026, against central.xero.com.

Related fixes

If you've turned everything on and the money still isn't moving, or you'd rather someone ran the whole chase for you, replies included, that's the sort of thing I look at in a free 30-minute review.