Summary
- The short answer: Xero shows you each customer’s overdue balance today, but never the direction it’s moving. Trove reports on the change week on week and alerts you when an account crosses a limit you set.
- What Xero can and can’t do: in Xero there’s no memory of last week’s position and no setting for “tell me when this account goes over £1,000 overdue”. You can use the aged receivables report to review this manually.
- How Trove does it: sort a report by the week-on-week increase in debt and set a threshold so Trove sends you a heads-up when an account crosses your limit.
The limitations of Xero’s Aged Receivables report
Xero’s aged receivables report gives you an outstanding balance and an ageing bucket. You can also see each customer’s outstanding and overdue balance, and you can sort the data by amount to find the largest. We have written this guide on how to use your aged receivables report in Xero.
If you are tracking this closely every week, you can see which customers are getting worse. However this approach requires time and effort.
Xero does not automatically give you an overview of which accounts are deteriorating week-on-week. To do this automatically, you need a dedicated tool.
| Report | What it tells you | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| Outstanding balance | The size of the exposure | The direction of travel |
| Ageing report | How old the debt is today | Whether the balance is growing or shrinking |
| Change over time | Which accounts are deteriorating | Nothing, if you also keep the balance in view |
A ‘change over time’ report highlights the problem
At a glance, a ‘change over time’ report highlights every customer whose overdue balance has grown since last week or month. Ideally, this is also prioritised by size of change - the customers who have deteriorated the most are at the top.
This is the list of customers where taking action sooner can lead to a better outcome. If you get in touch early, you can move your invoices to the front of the queue and increase the chances that you will be paid on time.
In Trove you build this report by syncing your Xero data and sorting on the week-on-week increase in debt. When an invoice is raised or a payment lands in Xero, webhooks mean the report reflects the difference straight away.
Set a balance threshold for debtors
Not ever deterioration is equally important. A customer who has deteriorated by £80 and a customer who has deteriorated by £8,000 would both be on the ‘change over time’ report, but you may only need to action one of them.
In this case, it might be better to build a report for when customers cross a balance threshold. In Trove, you set a threshold (say £5,000) and when a customer crosses the threshold, Trove sends you a notification so you can act on it.
A typical business using a balance threshold might be running hundreds or thousands of invoices a month: their bad debt is creeping up and they want a flag when an account reaches a size that needs attention.
Should you build weekly or monthly debtor reports
Weekly suits businesses invoicing continuously: retail accounts, trade accounts, anything with repeat orders. A balance can double in a week and a monthly report might not be granular enough.
Monthly suits project work and professional services, where invoices are larger, less frequent, and a single new invoice will always look like a spike.
Set the cadence to match how often you actually invoice. A report arriving faster than your billing cycle produces noise, and noise gets ignored.
The takeaway on tracking overdue balances
Xero stores all the data you need but has no functionality for proactive monitoring. It can’t tell you whether an account is improving or deteriorating and when it breaches your overdue threshold. If you want either, you need a layer on top of Xero that watches the balances for you.
Trove gives you both: a report sorted by which accounts are deteriorating fastest, and a threshold alert routed to whoever owns the account. Your everyday reminders carry on untouched.
Trove runs a free 30-day trial and takes about five minutes to connect to your Xero account.
FAQ
Can Xero show me which customers’ balances are growing?
No. Xero reports the current balance and ageing, with no comparison to a previous period. To see the change you need a tool that keeps a history, which is what the week-on-week increase column in a Trove report gives you.
Can Xero alert me when a customer owes more than a set amount?
No. Xero shows each customer’s overdue and outstanding balance, but it has no threshold alert. You’d need to sort your aged receivables manually to find accounts over a given amount.
How do I get notified when an account hits a certain overdue balance?
Use a credit control tool that connects to Xero and watches each account’s overdue total. In Trove you set the threshold and get an internal notification when a customer crosses it.
Does the threshold alert go to the customer?
No. It’s an internal heads-up sent to you or the team member who owns the account. Customer reminders run separately.
Can different parts of the business use different thresholds?
Yes. In Trove the threshold is set per workflow, so different teams or entities can use different limits and route the alerts to different people.
