Automating aged receivables reminders to directors

Short answer: Xero’s invoice reminders email your customers, not your directors. For the directors, send an aged receivables summary (what is owed, how overdue, by which customers) every week if cash is tight or monthly inside the management pack, with the unpaid invoice list beside it and an agreed action for each overdue bucket. At the time of writing Xero does not email reports on a schedule, so someone has to export and send it, or a scheduling tool does.

Late payment is one of the most common reasons a profitable business runs short of cash. Most businesses using Xero already chase customers in some form. Fewer have a reliable way of telling the directors, every week or month, how much is owed, by whom and how overdue it is.

Those are two different jobs. This guide explains the difference, what Xero handles natively, and how to put a regular receivables summary in front of the people who make decisions about credit and cash.

Two kinds of reminder

Customer-facing reminders go to the people who owe you money. Their purpose is to get a specific invoice paid.

Director-facing reports go to the owners or managers of the business. Their purpose is oversight: spotting a customer who is drifting further behind, deciding whether to stop supply, or planning for a cash shortfall.

Xero is well equipped for the first. The second usually needs a bit of process.

What Xero does for customers

Xero has built-in invoice reminders. According to Xero Central, you can turn on automatic reminders that email customers when an invoice is due or overdue, create up to five reminders, and set each one to send a number of days before or after the due date. Xero provides default reminders you can edit, and options such as including a link to the online invoice or skipping reminders for small balances. Check Xero Central for the conditions that decide which invoices receive reminders in your organisation.

Xero also lets you send customer statements, which summarise what a customer owes. At the time of writing, automatically emailing statements on a schedule is not a native feature: it is listed as “In discovery” on Xero’s product ideas forum, with an update from Xero in August 2026 saying the team was still doing discovery work. Statements can be sent manually whenever you choose.

For many small businesses, Xero’s invoice reminders are enough to keep customers paying on time. It is worth turning them on before looking at anything else.

What directors need instead

Invoice reminders go to customers, not to the business owner. A director does not want a copy of every reminder email. They want a single, regular view that answers:

• How much is owed to the business in total?
• How much of that is overdue, and by how long?
• Which customers account for most of the overdue balance?
• Is the position getting better or worse?

That is what an aged receivables summary provides. It groups outstanding invoices by how long they are past due, typically into buckets such as Current, 1-30 days, 31-60 days, 61-90 days and over 90 days, broken down by customer.

Xero’s aged receivables reports

Xero includes Aged Receivables reports in both summary and detail form. Depending on the report, options include adjusting the ageing periods and choosing whether invoices are aged by invoice date or by due date, so check the settings on the version you use. A director who logs in to Xero can run these at any time.

The gap, as with other Xero reports, is delivery. At the time of writing Xero does not email reports on a schedule (see Xero report scheduling: what Xero does and doesn’t do), so getting the summary to a director who does not log in means running it, exporting it and emailing it yourself.

How often to send it

Frequency depends on how sensitive the business is to cash flow:

• Weekly for businesses with tight cash, many small customers or a history of slow payers. A Monday morning summary gives directors time to act during the week.
• Monthly for businesses with fewer, larger customers and comfortable cash reserves. This can sit inside the monthly management pack; see how to send a monthly management pack from Xero.

If in doubt, start weekly. It is easier to reduce frequency than to explain why nobody noticed a large debt slipping past 90 days.

To show directors what the overdue total means for the business, put it next to the cash position. The free cash runway calculator shows how long the cash in the bank lasts at the current pace, and how much longer it lasts if the money owed is collected. The free debtor days calculator adds the other half: how many days customers take to pay on average, against your terms.

Making the summary useful

A table of numbers on its own does not change behaviour. A few habits help:

1. Agree what action each bucket triggers. For example: 31-60 days gets a phone call, 61-90 days goes to a director, over 90 days means supply is paused pending payment.
2. Send it alongside the unpaid invoice list. The summary shows the size of the problem. The invoice list shows exactly which invoices to chase.
3. Watch the trend, not just the total. A rising 31-60 day bucket is an early warning that the 90+ bucket will grow next month.
4. Keep the recipient list tight. Receivables reports name customers and amounts. Send them to the people who need to act on them.
5. Check the data first. Unmatched payments make customers look overdue when they have already paid. Reconcile before relying on the numbers.

Automating the director summary

If the manual export is what stops this happening every week, a scheduling tool can take it over. ReportPilot is one option. It connects to Xero with read-only access and emails a pack on a weekly, monthly or quarterly schedule, as a combined PDF, XLSX and CSV. A receivables-focused pack might contain the aged receivables summary and the list of unpaid invoices, with the Profit and Loss or Bank Summary added for context.

One detail worth knowing: ReportPilot builds its aged receivables summary from outstanding invoices, bucketed by due date (Current, 1-30, 31-60, 61-90 and 90+ days) as at the send date. If your own Xero Aged Receivables report is set to age by invoice date, or uses different periods, the two will not line up exactly. Decide which basis your directors should see and keep it consistent.

Because figures are pulled fresh from Xero at send time, the summary reflects payments recorded in Xero up to the moment it is generated. If you want to check it before it reaches the directors, approval mode sends it to the bookkeeper first with an “Approve & send” link.

Customer reminders and director reports work best together: Xero chases the customer, and the directors see the result. ReportPilot asks Xero for read-only access, and there is a 14-day free trial with no card.

Common questions

What does an aged receivables summary show? What customers owe, grouped by how far past due each invoice is. For example, £48,000 owed in total: £30,000 current, £10,000 1-30 days, £5,000 31-60 days, £2,000 61-90 days and £1,000 over 90 days. That is £18,000 (37.5%) overdue, and the £3,000 over 60 days is where a director’s attention should go first. For reading the report line by line, see Xero’s aged debtors and creditors reports.

Can Xero email the aged receivables report to directors automatically? Not at the time of writing. Xero’s invoice reminders go to customers, scheduled emailing of customer statements is still listed as “In discovery”, and Xero does not email reports on a schedule. A director who logs in can run the report at any time; for anyone who does not, it has to be exported and emailed, or sent by a scheduling tool.

Should invoices be aged by invoice date or by due date? For directors, by due date, because that shows what is actually late. An invoice dated 1 September on 30-day terms is 49 days old on 20 October, but only 19 days overdue. Aged by invoice date it lands in the 31-60 bucket and looks like a problem; aged by due date it sits in 1-30. Pick one basis and keep it the same in every report.

How often should directors get the receivables report? Weekly if cash is tight, customers are many and small, or some pay slowly: a Monday summary leaves the week to act. Monthly is enough for a few large, reliable customers and a healthy bank balance, usually as part of the monthly management pack.

What should directors look for in it? The trend in the middle buckets more than the total. If the 31-60 day bucket rises from £3,000 to £7,500 in a month, the over-90 bucket is likely to grow next. Then the few customers behind most of the overdue balance, and any single customer who keeps moving into an older bucket. For a quick answer to who owes the most, see who owes me money in Xero.

Why does a customer show as overdue when they have already paid? Usually because the payment is in the bank feed but has not been reconciled against the invoice in Xero, so the invoice still looks unpaid. Reconcile before sending the summary, or the directors will chase a customer who has paid.