You can invoice different departments in the same company in Xero by adding several contacts to one customer and choosing the right person when you send each invoice. What you can’t do is chase them separately - Xero reminders go to all the email addresses on the customer record, not the email each invoice went to. So a chaser meant for HR can land with HR and also Finance, Sales and everyone else on the account. This page explains why one customer with several recipients causes this, why the Xero workarounds create more work, and how to chase each department only about its own invoices.
Can you invoice different departments in the same customer in Xero?
Yes. You can add multiple contacts to a single Xero customer - one per department, site or project - and pick the right recipient from the “To” field each time you send an invoice. Invoicing different people within one company works fine.
Chasing them separately is where it breaks. Xero’s invoice reminders don’t follow the recipient you chose on the invoice. When a reminder runs, it goes to the primary contact plus everyone with “Include in emails” ticked on that customer. So the invoice can go to one department while the subsequent reminder goes to all of them.
Why does Xero chase every department instead of just one?
It’s how Xero is set up. The invoice remembers who you sent it to but the reminder doesn’t. When the reminder is sent, Xero goes to the customer’s contact list and emails everyone on it.
This is a common complaint. Businesses keep one customer record per client for clean accounting, then invoice several people inside that client separately. A few real examples we see at Trove:
- A benefits company invoicing HR, Finance and Sales separately within one client, and not wanting each department to see the others’ overdue chasers.
- A firm raising invoices per case or project to different contacts inside a client - for instance a law firm where each matter has its own contact, and a reminder should only go to the person handling that matter.
- A supplier to a large customer with multiple sites or regions, kept as one customer for accounting, where the right recipient varies by site and no one wants chasers for invoices that aren’t theirs.
In every case the structure is identical: one Xero customer, several real recipients, each of whom should only receive reminders about their own invoices.
Why don’t the Xero workarounds solve it?
There are two ways to handle this in Xero, and both create new problems.
Split the company into separate Xero customers. You could set up HR, Finance and Sales as three separate customers. Reminders would then go to the right place, but you lose the single customer view your accounting relies on - statements, aged receivables, credit limits and the overall balance for that client are now fragmented across several records. For many finance teams that’s a worse problem than the one you started with.
Manage “Include in emails” by hand. You could keep one customer and untick everyone except the person a given invoice went to. But the recipient changes from invoice to invoice, so you’d be editing the contact record before every send and risking the wrong department being chased every time you forget.
Neither gives you what you actually want: one customer record, with each invoice chased only to the department that received it.
How to chase each department separately with Trove
Trove connects to your Xero account and lets you assign each invoice to a specific contact. Reminders for that invoice then go to that contact only, so HR is chased about HR’s invoices and no one else sees them - while the customer stays as a single record in Xero.
You can do this at three levels:
- As a default customer rule. Set the rule once and Trove applies it automatically to every invoice for that customer, so the reminder always goes to the invoice recipient without you touching it.
- As a default account rule. If you always need every invoice reminder sent to the same person the invoice was sent to, you can set this up as an account rule in Trove.
- Per invoice. For one-offs, assign an individual invoice to a specific contact and only that person is chased (as shown below).
In each case, the accounting view stays intact; only the chasing gets split by recipient.
“This app has saved us a huge amount of valuable time. We had always struggled with Xero’s automated email function, as we invoice multiple clients within the same organisation. This app has allowed us to assign email addresses to individual invoices, which has made the process far more efficient. I would highly recommend it to any organisation facing the same issue. Trove is easy to use and very forward thinking, actively taking on customer feedback and implementing changes to meet customer needs.”
Daisy Docherty, Head of Finance, GTR. Read full review
Try it on your own Xero account
Trove runs a free 30-day trial and takes about five minutes to connect to your Xero account. Start a free trial or book a demo to see how to chase each department separately.
For the wider picture, see why Xero sends reminders to the wrong contact. If you want each reminder to follow the exact person you invoiced, see how to send a reminder only to the original recipient. And if departments need invoices at one address and reminders at another, see sending reminders to a different email than the invoice.
