Sending a reminder before the due date in Xero

Summary

• Most businesses only start chasing once an invoice is overdue. By then the friction has already built: the invoice has slipped off the customer’s radar and an approval may need re-triggering.
• A reminder sent before the due date removes the friction and (where necessary) gets a PO confirmed while there’s still time to make the payment run.
• Xero can send before-due reminders: set a stage to send a number of days before the due date, edit the wording, and cap it to invoices above a value.
• What Xero can’t do: route that reminder to a different contact than your overdue chasers or send from your own email address. For POs, this is important.
• Trove sends pre-due reminders from your own address, routed to whichever contact you choose, worded independently of the rest of your sequence.

Why bother sending a reminder before the due date

Most businesses only start chasing invoices after they become overdue and feel pushy contacting the client before they’re late to pay. This is back to front. By sending a reminder to check everything’s on track for payment, you’re taking some of the administrative burden off the client and offering to help them get their ducks in a row.

For corporate customers, this gets specific. Their invoice can’t be paid until it’s matched to a purchase order, and if it reaches the due date still missing a PO, it has already missed that week’s payment run. A reminder sent a week or two ahead asks them to confirm the PO while there’s still time. That’s why enterprise customers park a no-PO invoice.

When you should send a pre-reminder

Not every invoice needs one. Here are the situations where a pre-due-date reminder is reliably worth sending.

Customers who pay against a PO. If a corporate customer won’t pay without a matching purchase order, a pre-reminder is how you confirm the PO is in place before the due date, rather than discovering it’s missing once the invoice is already late.

Annual subscriptions and renewals. Invoices for annual services are easy to forget. Your customer signed up 12 months ago, the renewal lands, and it doesn’t have the urgency of something they’ve just asked for. A heads-up a week before the due date means they have time to sort budget approval before the deadline, not after.

High-value invoices. Larger invoices often require sign-off from someone more senior than the person you normally deal with. That approval can take several days. If your customer only sees the reminder after the due date has passed, they’re already starting the process late.

When there’s a long gap between invoice date and due date. On 30-day or 60-day terms, there’s a real chance the invoice has been filed away and forgotten by the time it falls due. A reminder a week before brings it back to the top of the pile while it’s still easy to action.

When the customer pays by bank transfer. Card payments are one click. Bank transfers require the customer to log in, find your details, and initiate a payment manually. It’s easy to intend to do it and then not get around to it. A pre-reminder gives them a specific prompt to act before the deadline.

When not to send a pre-reminder

Very small invoices. For low-value invoices, a pre-reminder can feel disproportionate, and the admin overhead isn’t worth it. Set a threshold that makes sense for your business (many Trove users set this at invoices above £500 or £1,000).

Customers who consistently pay on time or early. If a customer reliably pays before the due date every month, a pre-reminder adds no value and could feel unnecessary. Most collections tools let you exclude specific customers or workflows from pre-reminders for this reason.

Very short payment terms. On 7-day invoices, a pre-reminder sent 3 days before the due date goes out on day 4, almost immediately after the invoice itself. That can feel like pressure rather than a helpful nudge. Pre-reminders work best when there’s enough of a gap to give genuine lead time.

What a pre-due-date reminder looks like

The tone is lighter than a standard chaser. This isn’t a late payment, it’s a courtesy heads-up.

For a customer who pays against a PO:

Subject: Invoice #1042 due 18 April - can you confirm the PO?

Hi Sarah,

Just a heads-up that invoice #1042 for £1,250 is due on 18 April. So we can get it onto your next payment run, could you confirm the PO number we should quote on it?

Happy to send anything your procurement team needs from our side.

View invoice →

Thanks, James

For most other invoices:

Subject: Invoice #1042 due on 18 April - just a heads-up

Hi Sarah,

Just wanted to flag that invoice #1042 for £1,250 is due on 18 April. Wanted to make sure you had it on your radar ahead of time.

Payment details are on the attached invoice or via the link below if it’s easier:

View invoice →

Let me know if you have any questions.

Kind regards, James

What you can do in Xero

Xero’s reminder system does support before-due reminders, and it’s free.

Add a reminder that sends before the due date. In Sales > Invoices, open Invoice reminders. As well as the default overdue reminders, add a stage set to “Send if an invoice is due in [X] days.” Set it to 10 and Xero emails the customer ten days before the invoice is due.

Use up to five stages in total. Xero allows up to five reminder stages per invoice, before or after the due date. So you might run one pre-due nudge and three or four overdue follow-ups.

Edit the wording. Each stage has its own subject and body. For a pre-due reminder you’d want lighter wording than a chaser.

Set a value threshold. You can tell Xero only to send reminders for invoices above a certain amount, so a pre-reminder doesn’t fire on every small invoice.

Turn it off per customer or per invoice. Exclude a reliable payer at the contact level, or switch reminders off on a single invoice.

What you can’t do in Xero

The gaps are all about who the reminder reaches.

You can’t send the pre-due reminder to a different contact. This is the big one for POs. Xero sends every reminder, pre-due and overdue alike, to whichever contacts are flagged to receive emails on the customer record. There’s no way to send the pre-due “please confirm the PO” note to procurement while your overdue chasers go to accounts payable. Yet that split is exactly what a PO needs.

You can’t send from your own email address. Reminders come from @xero.com, not from you. At a large company with strict email security, that can land in spam. Xero reminders and spam filtering is a known issue.

You can’t chase a repeating invoice. Xero only sends reminders for invoices that are approved and marked as sent. More on which invoice states can and can’t be chased.

You can’t vary the message by customer type. One reminder schedule and one set of templates apply to your whole customer base. Sending different reminders to different customers in Xero covers where that falls down.

The data

70% of the businesses with the highest collection rates on Trove use pre-due-date reminders. We’re cautious about overstating the causal relationship as businesses that use pre-reminders also tend to run tighter collections overall. But the correlation is strong and consistent across different business types and invoice volumes.

The businesses that see the biggest impact are those with longer payment terms (30+ days) and a mix of invoice sizes. Pre-reminders seem to matter less where all invoices are small and recurring.

How a pre-reminder fits into your full chase sequence

A pre-reminder sits at the start of the sequence, before your first standard chaser. The full arc looks like this:

1. Pre-reminder (3-7 days before due date), light, helpful tone, and where the PO gets confirmed
2. Friendly first reminder (1-3 days overdue)
3. Gentle follow-up (7-10 days overdue)
4. Firmer nudge (14-21 days overdue)
5. Final notice (30+ days overdue)

Escalate the tone gradually across steps 2-5, from a friendly nudge to a firm final notice.

In Trove, pre-reminders are set using a negative day offset. Setting a reminder to “-5 days” sends it five days before the invoice due date. It sits in the same sequence as your other reminders and goes out automatically, no manual action needed.

How Trove closes the gap

Trove keeps the part Xero gets right - a reminder that goes out before the due date - and fixes who receives it.

• It sends from your own email address, so it looks like a message from you, not from your accounting software.
• It’s routed to whichever contact you choose, so a PO request reaches procurement or the buyer while your overdue chasers still go to accounts payable.
• It’s worded independently of your other reminders, so the pre-due note can simply ask the customer to confirm the PO.

The right message, to the right person, before the clock runs out.