How to send different invoice reminders by customer location or region

Customers in different regions often need different timing, tone, and a different person chasing them. Xero sends the same reminder everywhere. Here's the available workaround and how to put each region in its own workflow using Trove.

When you sell across regions, the same reminder rarely works everywhere. Timing and language shift with the geography and the person doing the chasing is often different depending on where the customer is.

Xero treats every customer the same. Reminders run on one organisation-wide schedule, sent from one address, not accounting for where the customer is or who looks after that territory. You can’t put one region on one workflow and another region on a different one.

You can do that with a tool like Trove on top of Xero. Here’s the gap in Xero and how segmenting by location actually works.

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 how to make sure a reminder goes to the person you invoiced.

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.