Xero limits automatic invoice reminders to five stages. Once those five have fired, the system stops permanently and silently. Currently there is nothing to tell you that your debtors are no longer being emailed.

This has been a source of frustration for Xero users for years. The Xero Product Ideas thread requesting unlimited reminders has been going since 2022 with comments like “does Xero not think we care about getting paid once we’ve sent 5 reminders?” Xero’s response, as of 2025, is that it’s under consideration.

But if you’re thinking about switching tools purely to get past the five-reminder limit, it’s worth stepping back. The cap is a frustration but for most businesses it probably isn’t the main thing standing between you and getting paid.

The bigger issue is whether reminders are being received and read

Trove is a debtor management software that helps small businesses collect unpaid invoices. Trove’s data across thousands of invoices shows that around 80% of overdue invoices are recovered within the first two reminders. We’ve written about what that means for how you time your chasing. If most invoices get paid within the first two emails, why are Xero users frustrated about the cap?

It’s most likely because those first two invoices aren’t actually reaching the customer’s inbox or are just being ignored.

Reminder emails sent from Xero’s domain get filtered. Every Xero reminder goes out from xero.com not from your business. Your customer’s inbox doesn’t recognise the sender and so spam filters treat it with suspicion. The spam filtering problem is covered in detail here, but the short version is: a reminder that doesn’t arrive is useless regardless of where it sits in a sequence of five.

If a reminder does get delivered, it’s more likely to be ignored. People respond to people. If Xero sends an automatic reminder (even if it includes a note from you), your customers are more likely to ignore it. This could be another factor in why five reminders aren’t enough on Xero.

What a better chasing sequence looks like

Once your reminders are reliably reaching customers, the structure of what you send starts to matter.

Send from your own email address. This isn’t just a spam filtering fix. It changes how customers respond. An email that arrives from accounts@yourcompany.com reads as a direct communication from someone they have a relationship with. The same message sent from a platform address reads as an automated notification that’s easy to ignore. Getting this right typically lifts response rates before you’ve changed a single word of your template.

Escalate when customers don’t respond. A polite reminder at 7 days and a sterner reminder at 60 days are doing very different jobs. For invoices that are genuinely stuck, the next step should be something that changes the situation: a late payment fee, a payment plan offer, or a clear statement that the account is being referred to a collections service. Having clear visibility over when payment reminders are being ignored is crucial and this is something that Xero doesn’t provide.

How Trove handles it

All reminders within Trove send from your own email address, so they arrive in your customer’s inbox looking like they came from you. You build sequences that run for as long as needed, with the tone shifting as the invoice ages. Trove’s AI can suggest appropriate wording at each stage, so you’re not starting from scratch when you need a firmer message.

When a customer still hasn’t paid after several reminders, Trove gives you options beyond sending another email: you can apply a late payment fee, offer a payment plan, or refer the invoice to a debt recovery service directly from the platform.

For most businesses, the five-reminder cap in Xero isn’t the core problem. Getting reminders delivered, getting customers to respond, and having a clear path for invoices that don’t resolve themselves - those are the things that make the difference.

Trove runs a free 30-day trial and takes about five minutes to connect to your Xero account. You can start a free trial here or book a demo if you’d like to see it first.