Summary
- The short answer: Xero can’t combine reminders across different Xero contacts, even when they share the same primary email address; each customer gets chased separately. Trove groups the companies and sends one email instead.
- Why Xero can’t: reminders work at the invoice level and contact groups aren’t wired into them, so being grouped in Xero changes nothing about how each company is chased.
- The workaround: pull the outstanding invoices from each company manually and combine them into a single email to the shared contact yourself. A shortcut is to use statements instead.
- How Trove does it: group Xero customers that share a contact and sends that person one email listing every overdue invoice across their different companies.
The problem: one contact across several customers in Xero gets a chaser for each
Some of your customers have complex setups. A single person is often your contact for a group of related businesses, each set up as its own customer in Xero because each is a separate legal entity.
Raising invoices against each company separately is correct. But when it’s time to chase, Xero treats each one as an unrelated customer. So the one person who handles payment for all of them gets a separate reminder for every company (sometimes for every invoice) even though as far as they’re concerned it’s all the same relationship. This is when they will get reminder fatigue and start ignoring your emails.
Why Xero can’t send one combined reminder
Xero’s reminders work at the invoice level and each contact belongs to a single customer. There’s no setting that says “these five customers are really one relationship, chase them together.”
Xero does have contact groups, and you’d reasonably expect them to help. Unfortunately that’s not the case. A group lets you see the companies together, but you can’t send a statement or a reminder to a group, and you can’t report on one.
The workaround for sending one email per contact in Xero
The manual fix is nothing smart: go through each company, download the outstanding invoices and combine them manually into a single email to the shared contact. This is still time consuming.
A better workaround is to download PDF statements from each company. This is still manual but does mean one click per company instead of a click per invoice. Xero’s statements automatically export with links to each invoice so the customer can still get the documents they need.
How Trove groups companies so one contact gets one email
Trove lets you group several Xero companies together when they share a contact. Once they’re grouped, that contact receives a single chasing email listing every overdue invoice across all of their companies. The person sees one clear picture - everything they owe you, organised by entity - instead of a stack of separate reminders.
Nothing changes within Xero. Trove simply merges the reminders into one email to the contact. Replies, notes and payment history for the whole group live in one place too, so when someone asks “when did we last chase them?” the answer covers the whole group rather than one invoice out of many.
Who this helps most
This is worth setting up whenever one person sits behind several of your Xero customers:
- Holding companies and their subsidiaries, where head-office accounts pays for the whole group.
- Manufacturing, logistics, where there are often multiple plants, vessel or routes that act as their own limited company with one back office settling the invoices.
- Franchises and multi-branch businesses, where one owner covers several sites.
- Any group structure where a single accounts-payable contact handles invoices spread across separate legal entities.
Chase them as the one relationship they are
Trove connects to Xero in about five minutes and reads your customers straight in, so you can group the companies that share a contact and chase them together, in one email, instead of bombarding one person with a reminder per company.
Start a free trial or book a demo if you’d like to see it set up first.
