The credit control reports that matter when you run a group

Summary

• The short answer: four reports give you an overview across a portfolio: debtor movement month on month, aged receivables at customer level with history, days sales outstanding and revenue recovered.
• Debtor movement matters: a flat list of outstanding debts looks the same whether things are improving or getting worse. What you want is who’s deteriorating, who’s new, and who’s improving.
• Customer level with history: total debt at a customer level means you can quickly spot issues and dig into activity history where necessary.
• Days sales outstanding and revenue recovered: these two are more standard reports that give you a quick insight into whether your overall situation is improving or deteriorating.
• What Xero gives you: an aged receivables snapshot per entity but with no indication of debtor movement and no notes attached.
• How Trove does it: you get all of the reports listed above at an entity-by-entity level, with all chase history synced back to Xero.

1. Debtor movement, month on month

This report shows you which customers are moving in the wrong direction. Each month you can see:

• Deteriorating: Which customers owe more this month vs last month
• No change: Who is completely static month on month.
• Improving: Customers who are paying down their balance.
• New: Customers with a debt for the first time this month.
• Cleared: The stars who have paid down their debt.

Deteriorating sounds the worst, but ‘no change’ can be more worrying. These customers are often the ones who have stopped responding and are no longer making new purchases. Getting back in contact with these customers is a crucial first step to recovering your debts.

2. Aged receivables at customer level, with history

This gives you a quick overview of your total aged receivables and how they are split by customer. If one customer is 90% of your aged receivables, you will need to take different actions vs if they are evenly spread across 20. One is a bad debtor, the other is a process failure.

the important difference to Xero’s native report is that this one should come with history of efforts so far to recover the unpaid invoices. Tools like Trove keep track of all emails sent, any notes made by the team and any responses from the customer to date.

3. Days sales outstanding across the group

DSO is the single trend line for whether you’re getting paid faster or slower over time. Tracking this for each entity will help you spot if one entity is veering off track.

It’s a lagging number, so don’t over-read a single month. Watched over a quarter, it’s the clearest signal that consistent chasing is landing.

4. Revenue recovered

This is the proof the function is paying for itself: what’s been chased and then paid. Alongside it, a simple split of total revenue into what’s been paid already, what’s been paid after a chase, and what’s still outstanding.

This view helps a CFO weighing up whether in-house credit control is paying off.

Group credit control reporting: in summary

Four views cover it: who’s getting worse or unchanging, what’s owed at customer level with the notes attached, whether DSO is trending down and how much revenue chasing has actually recovered.

Trove pulls these across all your entities and keeps the notes and chase history synced with Xero rather than in a spreadsheet.

FAQ

Can Xero show debtors across multiple companies?

No. Xero keeps each company as a separate organisation with its own aged receivables report. You can switch between entities under one login to view each one, but there’s no combined group-level view of what’s owed.

Should a group debtor report be at customer or invoice level?

Customer level for the regular report. Invoice level matters when you’re working a specific account, but for contract clients with invoices spread across cost centres, an invoice-level list runs to hundreds of rows and nobody reads it.

Can we get a credit control report emailed to us weekly?

You can export the reports you need today, and scheduled report emails are something we’re building. If a weekly ledger summary to a director is what your group needs, it’s worth telling us so we prioritise it.

Where should credit control notes live?

Wherever the chasing happens, so the report can be generated rather than assembled. Notes in a spreadsheet mean only one person can produce the report, and the context disappears when they’re away. Notes recorded against the customer can also be published back to Xero.

What’s a good DSO for a group?

It varies too much by sector and payment terms for a single benchmark to be useful. The number that matters is your own trend: whether DSO across the group is falling quarter on quarter.