Summary

  • The short answer: Xero can’t vary reminders by region; the same schedule goes to every customer. Trove puts each region in its own workflow.
  • The workaround: turn reminders off for all but one region and chase the rest manually. We’ll cover how this works below.
  • How Trove does it: it reads the address on your Xero customer and routes each region into its own workflow with its own owner, timing, and wording.
  • Example: a few Trove customers run each US or Canadian state as its own workflow, chased by the team member who looks after that state.

Why Xero can’t vary reminders by region

Xero’s reminders are a single global setting. Once they’re on, the same schedule and the same email go to every sent invoice, wherever the customer is based. There’s no filter for country, state, or any other location field, and no way to assign a region to a particular person on your team.

The pain shows up clearly for businesses with customers spread across regions. On Xero’s product ideas board, people describe needing reminders to reflect region, project, or business unit for multi-region customers, and having to update contact records by hand to cope. The request keeps recurring because the single global setting can’t account for any of it.

For more on where Xero’s reminders fall short, see the limitations of Xero invoice reminders.

The manual workaround in Xero

The workaround sounds bad when you say it out loud, but at least makes Xero’s in-built reminders usable. Start by turning reminders off for all but the most invoice-heavy geography. You can read our guide on how to turn off reminders at the customer level here.

Then whoever owns the other geographies can chase invoices the old-fashioned way - from their inbox. This will mean much less chasing for the person looking after the first geography but doesn’t improve the lives of the other members of the team much.

How Trove puts each region in its own workflow

Trove reads the address on your Xero contacts and lets you filter by it, then route each region into its own reminder workflow. Each workflow can have its own timing, its own wording, and its own owner, so the right person chases the right territory automatically.

One Trove customer does exactly this across the United States. Each state sits in its own workflow and each workflow is assigned to a different team member. This means customers in each state are sent reminders by the person responsible for that state. No one sorts invoices by location first and nothing depends on someone remembering who covers where.

Location is one of several things you can segment on. For the full picture, start with whether you can send different Xero reminders to different customers, or see how the same approach works when you split reminders by product line. If regional customers also mean reminders reaching the wrong office, it’s worth reading why Xero sends reminders to the wrong contact.

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. You can start a free trial here or book a demo if you’d like to see it set up first.