The problem: Xero sends payment reminders to every contact on a customer record
Here’s a scenario to illustrate the problem
Your company provides monthly cleaning services to 10 restaurants in your area. They are all part of the same group (Smith’s) but you invoice each restaurant separately.
Every month, Smith’s HQ also wants a statement of all invoices across the group so you set up Smith’s as one customer in Xero with 11 contacts - one email address per restaurant and one for HQ. When you send out the monthly invoices to the 10 restaurants, you choose the right recipient from the ‘To’ field in Xero and hit send. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, one of the restaurants - Smith’s Brasserie - is starting to pay late and so you turn on Xero invoice reminders to automatically chase them after 10 days of no payment.
On day 10, you get an angry email from Smith’s Brasserie. They have been emailed about their late payment, but so have all the other 10 contacts stored under Smith’s customer in Xero.
The Brasserie staff are angry about being shown up in front of their colleagues. Their colleagues are annoyed about irrelevant emails. And you are angry because Xero made your client angry with you.
A common complaint within Xero
This is one of the most common complaints about Xero’s automatic reminder system. When you start working with bigger or more complex customers, the reminder system can be limiting.
Here are a few other examples we have seen at Trove:
- A training company that invoices their customer’s employees separately for training: The customer wanted a statement but each employee was invoiced (and chased) separately
- A mechanic working for a car manufacturer with multiple plants: For accounting purposes, the manufacturer was kept as one customer in Xero but each plant needed separate invoices and payment reminders
- A benefits company that invoices different departments within the same company separately: Again for accounting purposes, the benefits company wanted to have one customer record in Xero but send (and chase) separate invoices to HR, Finance, Sales etc.
This article explains exactly why it happens, what you can fix inside Xero, and what you can’t.
Why Xero sends payment reminders to the wrong contacts
Xero’s invoice reminder system is built around contact records, not invoice recipients.
When you send an invoice in Xero, you’re attaching it to a contact. But the reminder system doesn’t track who that specific email was sent to - it pulls from whatever is saved in the contact’s profile at the time the reminder runs as shown in the diagram above.
There are a few specific reasons reminders end up going to the wrong place:
1. The primary contact isn’t the person you invoiced Xero defaults to the email address saved in the contact record, not the address you used when sending the invoice. If you typed in a different email when sending, the reminder goes elsewhere.
2. ‘Include in emails’ is ticked for multiple people If a contact has several individuals listed and more than one has the “Include in emails” checkbox ticked, Xero will send the reminder to all of them. For corporate clients where you’ve added multiple contacts over time, this can mean three or four people receive the email including people who have nothing to do with the invoice.
3. Xero’s newer invoicing doesn’t sync back to the contact In Xero’s updated invoicing system, sending an invoice to a specific email address no longer automatically updates the contact’s primary address. So the invoice and the reminder can end up going to two completely different places.
A few fixes you can make inside Xero
What you can improve
There are a few things you can do to reduce the problem, though none of them fully solve it.
Audit your contact records Go to Contacts > Customers and review who is listed for each client. Uncheck “Include in emails” for anyone who shouldn’t be receiving payment reminders. This does not directly solve the issue but will at least stop you accidentally spamming all contacts with payment reminders.
Turn off reminders for specific customers If you have sensitive or high-value clients you’d rather chase manually, you can disable automated reminders for them entirely within their contact record. This prevents the wrong-person problem for those clients, at the cost of having to manage them yourself.
Turn off reminders for specific invoices Within the “Awaiting Payment” tab, you can select individual invoices and choose “Turn off invoice reminders” from the More menu. Useful for one-off situations, but not scalable if the problem is widespread.
Xero’s core limitation
What you can’t do in Xero is tell the reminder system to follow the specific email address you used when sending the invoice. That link simply doesn’t exist in Xero’s architecture.
The reminder and the invoice are, in effect, two separate things.
When Xero’s workarounds aren’t enough
For businesses that send a small number of invoices to simple, single-contact clients, the workarounds above are manageable. But they break down quickly if:
- You have corporate clients with multiple departments or contacts
- You invoice the same company for different projects, sent to different people
- Your contact database is large and contact details change frequently
- You’re already spending significant time manually managing who gets chased
If any of those apply, you’re likely spending more time maintaining Xero’s contact structure than you are actually chasing invoices which defeats the point of having an automated system.
Software that solves the problem
Several tools integrate with Xero and give you more precise control over who receives payment reminders.
1. Trove Trove is the only software that tackles this problem directly. If you send an invoice to a certain email address in Xero, all payment reminders follow that same email address with Trove’s sub-customer feature. Any other contacts on the same Xero customer are not chased. This solves the core limitation within Xero. You can start a free 30-day trial here or book a demo to see it in action.
2. Chaser Chaser is a well-established collections tool that also integrates with Xero and gives more control over reminder sequences than Xero’s native system. It offers more flexibility around contact management than Xero, but it does not automatically track where an invoice was sent within Xero and therefore who payment reminders should be sent to. We’ve written a full comparison of Chaser and its alternatives here.
3. Paidnice Paidnice focuses on automating late fees and payment terms alongside reminders, and integrates with Xero. Better suited to businesses that want to enforce payment terms more formally rather than those primarily looking to fix the contact routing issue.
The bottom line
Xero’s invoice reminder system is a good starting point. It’s free on most Xero plans, quick to set up, and will recover a meaningful number of overdue invoices on autopilot. But it’s built around contact records rather than invoice recipients, and that creates a structural problem for anyone with complex client relationships.
The fixes available inside Xero can reduce the problem but not eliminate it. For businesses where this is a recurring issue, a dedicated tool is usually the cleaner solution.
If you want to see how Trove handles contact routing compared to Xero’s native system, the 30-day trial takes about five minutes to set up and connects directly to your existing Xero account.
