By default, Xero sends every invoice reminder to everyone on that customer with “Include in emails” ticked - not just the specific person you sent the invoice to. So a chaser meant for one person can land in the inboxes of colleagues, departments, or branches who have nothing to do with it. Xero has no way to make a reminder follow the address the invoice actually went to automatically. This page explains why that happens, who a reminder really goes to, what you can change inside Xero to limit it, and when a dedicated tool is the cleaner fix.

Why does Xero send invoice reminders to all my contacts?

Because Xero sends reminders based on the customer record, not the invoice. When a reminder runs, Xero looks at the customer’s contacts and emails anyone with “Include in emails” ticked. It doesn’t check who you sent the original invoice to. The invoice and the reminder are, in effect, two separate things pointed at the same contact.

Here’s how that plays out.

Your company provides a cleaning service to 10 restaurants in the same group (Smith’s). In Xero, you set up Smith’s as one contact with 11 emails - one per restaurant and one for HQ. Each month you invoice each restaurant separately, choosing the right recipient from the “To” field and hitting send.

One restaurant, Smith’s Brasserie, starts paying late, so you turn on Xero reminders to chase them after 10 days.

On day 10 you get an angry email from the Brasserie. They’ve been chased about their late payment - but so have all 10 other Smith’s addresses in Xero.

Diagram showing that Xero sends invoice reminders to all contacts, not just the one you invoiced

The Brasserie is embarrassed in front of the group. The other restaurants are annoyed by an email that has nothing to do with them. And you didn’t do anything wrong - Xero just sent the reminder to everyone.

Who exactly does a Xero invoice reminder go to?

A Xero reminder goes to the primary contact on the customer, plus every additional person who has “Include in emails” ticked. If you manually entered a different email address when you sent the invoice, the reminder still ignores it.

This is most annoying when one Xero customer covers several real recipients. A few examples we see at Trove:

  • A training company that invoices a client’s employees individually, and wants each employee chased individually.
  • A mechanic working for a manufacturer with multiple plants, kept as one customer for accounting but needing separate invoices and reminders per plant.
  • A benefits company invoicing different departments (HR, Finance, Sales) within one client, separately, and not wanting each department to see the others’ chasers.

In every case the structure is the same: one Xero customer, several people who should each only be chased about their own invoices.

How do I stop Xero sending reminders to all contacts?

You can reduce the problem with three steps inside Xero, though none of them make a reminder follow the invoice recipient.

1. Audit your contact records. Go to Contacts > Customers and review which email addresses are listed for each customer. Uncheck “Include in emails” for anyone who shouldn’t get payment reminders. This won’t link reminders to the right person, but it stops you spamming every contact.

2. Turn off reminders for specific customers. For sensitive or high-value clients you’d rather chase by hand, disable automated reminders on their contact record. It prevents the wrong-person problem for those clients, at the cost of managing invoice reminders yourself.

3. Turn off reminders for specific invoices. In the Awaiting Payment tab, select an invoice and choose “Turn off invoice reminders” from the More menu. Useful for one-offs, not scalable if the problem is widespread.

These help, but they all work by switching reminders off or trimming the recipient list. None of them point a reminder at the one person who should get it.

What can’t Xero do about this?

Xero can’t make the reminder automatically go to a single email address you have specified. It’s one of the most-requested fixes on Xero’s own product ideas board, with businesses asking to send reminders to the original recipient and the opposite - to send reminders to a different address than the invoice. Worth a vote, but neither is built yet.

How does Trove send reminders to the right contact only?

Trove connects to your Xero account and lets you assign an invoice to a specific contact, either manually or automatically based on filter criteria. From then on, every reminder about that invoice goes to that contact only and no one else on the Xero customer gets chased.

You can set it as a default rule for a customer, or per invoice when a one-off needs a different 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.”

Daisy Docherty, Head of Finance, GTR. Read full review

What if the right person still isn’t reading the email?

Sometimes the reminder reaches the right inbox and still goes unread either sitting in a shared mailbox no one reads or buried in a hundred other emails. That’s where a text can help: Trove can send SMS reminders as well as email, so you can reach the right person directly. See how SMS invoice reminders work.

The bottom line

Xero’s invoice reminder system is a good starting point. It’s free on most plans and quick to set up. But it does have a structural problem for anyone with a slightly more complex client setup. The 3 fixes inside Xero reduce the problem without solving it. For businesses where this keeps happening, a dedicated tool is usually cleaner.

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 reminders route to the right contact.

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