Xero invoice reminders: how to set them up, turn them off, and what to watch out for

How Xero invoice reminders work

Xero’s invoice reminder system sends automated emails to customers when invoices are approaching their due date or become overdue.

Key overview:

• You can configure up to 5 reminder emails
• You can set up one schedule that applies to all customers
• The system does a daily check and sends reminders between 4am and 8am
• Reminders are sent from Xero’s email domain (@xero.com)

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How to turn on Xero invoice reminders

1. Log into Xero and go to Sales > Invoices
2. In the top right of the page, you’ll see a button labelled Invoice reminders: Off - click it
3. Tick the box that says Email customers when an invoice is…
4. Configure your reminder schedule (see below)
5. Hit Save

The first batch of reminders will go out the following morning.

Configuring your reminder schedule

When you set up reminders, you can define up to five stages. For each stage, you choose:

• When the reminder is sent - a number of days before or after the invoice due date
• The email subject and body - Xero provides a default template which you can edit
• A minimum invoice threshold - reminders only send for invoices above a certain value (£0 means all invoices)

A typical starting sequence might look like:

• 3 days before due: a friendly heads-up
• 1 day after due: a polite reminder that payment is now overdue
• 7 days after due: a firmer follow-up
• 21 days after due: a more direct message referencing next steps

You don’t need to fill all five stages. Most businesses start with two or three and adjust from there. Trove’s data across thousands of invoices shows that 80% of overdue invoices are recovered within the first two reminders - so the first two emails are the most important to get right.

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How to turn off Xero invoice reminders

Turning off reminders globally

To disable invoice reminders for all customers:

1. Go to Sales > Invoices
2. Click the Invoice reminders: On button
3. Uncheck the box that says Email customers when an invoice is…
4. Save

This stops all automated reminders immediately. Invoices that have already had reminders sent will not receive further ones.

Turning off reminders for a specific customer

If you want to keep reminders running for most customers but exclude certain contacts - high-value clients you’d rather chase personally, for example - you can disable reminders at the contact level:

1. Go to Contacts > Customers
2. Open the relevant customer record
3. Under the contact details, find the Invoice reminders option and turn it off for that contact

Any invoices raised against that contact will be excluded from the global reminder schedule.

Turning off reminders for a specific invoice

You can also disable reminders on individual invoices. Open the invoice, find the reminders setting, and turn it off. Useful for one-off situations where you know you’ll be managing the follow-up manually.

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What to watch out for when using Xero invoice reminders

Xero’s reminder system works well for straightforward setups. As your customer base grows or gets more complex, a few structural limitations start to cause real problems.

1. Reminders go to the wrong person

This is the most common complaint, and it affects businesses that invoice multiple contacts within the same company.

Xero’s reminder system is built around contact records, not invoice recipients. When you send a reminder, Xero looks at who is listed in the customer record, not who received the original invoice. If you have ten contacts listed under one customer, all ten can receive the reminder, even if only one of them was invoiced.

For businesses with corporate clients, group accounts, or customers where different departments handle different invoices, this causes real friction. We’ve written a full breakdown of why this happens and what you can do about it.

2. Reminders can end up in spam

Every Xero reminder is sent from @xero.com, not from your business email address. Your customer’s inbox doesn’t recognise the sender, which means spam filters treat it with suspicion - particularly at larger companies with aggressive email security.

A reminder that doesn’t arrive is worse than no reminder: the invoice sits unpaid but you think it has been chased. The spam filtering problem is covered in detail here, along with the limited workarounds available within Xero.

3. There’s no way to send different reminders to different customers

Xero runs a single reminder sequence. Every customer gets the same emails on the same schedule with the same tone.

That works fine if your customer base is fairly homogeneous. It becomes a problem when you have long-standing clients who deserve a softer approach alongside newer customers who need a firmer one. How to send different invoice reminders per customer covers what’s possible within Xero and where you need a different tool.

4. Reminders stop after five emails

Xero caps automatic reminders at five stages per invoice. Once those five have been sent, that’s it. There’s no notification that a customer is no longer being chased and no way to extend the sequence within Xero.

For most invoices, five reminders is plenty. The issue tends to arise with slow payers or long-running overdue balances where the relationship needs to be managed over weeks or months. The five-email cap, what it means in practice, and what to do about it is worth reading if you’ve hit this problem.

5. Multiple invoices generate multiple emails

If a customer has three overdue invoices, Xero sends three separate reminder emails - potentially on the same day, to the same inbox. From your customer’s perspective, this looks like spam. Three emails about three different invoice numbers is harder to process than a single message saying “here’s what you owe.”

It also increases the chance that at least one email triggers a filter or gets buried. There’s no way to consolidate these into a single email reminder within Xero.

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When Xero reminders are enough and when they’re not

For most small businesses just starting to formalise their collections process, turning on Xero reminders is the right first step. It’s free, takes minutes to set up, and will recover a meaningful number of overdue invoices automatically.

The limitations start to matter when:

• You have customers where multiple contacts are stored under one record
• Your reminder emails are going to spam and you have no way to tell
• You need different sequences for different customer types
• You have persistent slow payers who need more than five chasers
• You want to know whether a reminder was actually received and read

If any of those sound familiar, the next step is a dedicated collections tool that integrates with Xero. The best invoice chasing software for Xero users in 2026 covers the main options, what each one costs, and which makes sense depending on your situation.