Xero overdue invoice report: the free, ranked chase list

What the report gives you

One list, in the order you should work it

Every overdue invoice, top to bottom, with the customer, the amount still owing, the due date and the days overdue on each line. Not 30, 60 and 90 day buckets — a queue. Start at the top and work down until you run out of morning.

A ranking you can see the sense of

The money, weighted by how long it has been out. A $12,000 invoice at 35 days sits above a $400 one at 95 days, because it is worth more to chase. Deliberately simple: you should never have to wonder why a row is at the top, and you can re-sort any column if you disagree.

Average days to pay, for every customer at once

Beside each customer's name: what they owe, how many invoices it spans, and how long they actually take to pay. It comes from a year of their settled invoices, so it is their real habit, not an impression. This is the number that changes how you make the call — 45 days for a customer who always pays in 40 is a nudge; 45 days for one who always pays in 7 is a problem.

Repeat late payers, named

Anyone who has paid late twice or more is marked. Two is a pattern; one is an accident. It tells you which conversation is about this invoice and which one is about your payment terms.

The flag nothing else can raise

Late for this customer is not the same as late. A customer who always pays six weeks after the due date is behaving normally at 40 days. One who has never missed a date and is now 95 days out is the one to ring today. The report compares every invoice against that customer's own record and marks the ones that are out of character.

That comparison needs a year of settled invoices, not just the overdue ones. It is why no report built from the aged receivables view can make it, and it is the row we would want you to look at first.

The three numbers at the top

What is overdue in total, how many customers it is spread across, and how old the oldest one is. One glance tells you whether this is a bad week or a habit.

It stays live

The report refreshes as your Xero does, so it is right the next time you open it. That is the difference between this and the spreadsheet you built last month, which was out of date by Thursday.

It works on the phone in your hand

The desktop view is a table. On a phone it is cards, with the same order and the same numbers. Chasing usually happens in the ute or between jobs, not at a desk.

One click, and nothing gets dialled

Connect Xero and the report is on screen. No plan to choose, no card, no signup form — the same click sets up your account. Gary rings nobody until you switch him on, invoice by invoice or customer by customer.

What Xero does show you

Xero is not weak here, and it is worth being straight about what you already have.

• The dashboard. "Invoices owed to you" gives you the awaiting-payment and overdue totals.
• The Awaiting Payment tab (Business → Invoices). Every unpaid invoice, with the days overdue on each. Sort by due date and your worst offenders are on screen.
• Aged Receivables Summary and Detail. What each customer owes, bucketed by age: 30, 60, 90 days and older, down to individual invoices.
• Receivable Invoice Detail. An invoice-level list with invoice date, due date, total, paid and amount due. It exports.
• Executive Summary. Debtor days for the business as a whole, useful as a month-to-month trend.

For closing off a month, that is a good set. It is the wrong shape when you are the one deciding who to ring on a Tuesday.

What Xero's reports won't tell you

These are the gaps our report was built to fill. Most are open requests on Xero's own forum, so it is Xero's customers saying it, not us.

• No days overdue column in any report. It shows on the Awaiting Payment tab and nowhere else — not in Aged Receivables, not in Receivable Invoice Detail, and not in an export. It is an open request on Xero's product ideas forum, so you can stop hunting for the setting.
• No average days to pay report. Xero works the figure out and shows it on each customer's contact record, one customer at a time. People have been asking for it as a report column since 2014.
• No customer payment performance report. Nothing compares payment date against due date across your book, so there is no list of who is habitually three weeks late. Also an open request.
• The ageing buckets answer a different question. 30, 60 and 90 days is a balance-sheet view — how old the debtor ledger is, which is what your accountant needs. It will not tell you which of forty invoices is worth an hour of your morning.
• Nothing is ranked. No report puts value, age and payment history together. You do that in your head, which holds up at ten overdue invoices and not at forty.

Workarounds inside Xero today

If you would rather not connect anything, one of these is probably enough for this week.

• Sort the Awaiting Payment tab by due date. The quickest read of who is worst. On screen only.
• Export Receivable Invoice Detail and add the column yourself. The export carries the due date, so =TODAY()-[due date] in the next column gives you days overdue in about a minute. Date-stamp the file, because that formula recalculates every time you open it.
• Change the ageing periods on the Aged Receivables reports. You can age by due date instead of invoice date, and set how many periods to show and how long each runs. No days overdue, but if your terms aren't monthly it stops the buckets being nonsense.
• Open the contact record for your key accounts. Average days to pay is there, per customer. Fine for your top ten. Not a plan for two hundred.
• Track debtor days on the Executive Summary. It tells you whether the problem is getting worse, even though it can't tell you who to ring.

Then Gary rings them

Worth saying plainly, because it is the honest limit of every report on this page, ours included: knowing who to chase is not the same as chasing them.

That is the other half of what Gary does. He rings the customers you have approved, in a friendly voice, during business hours. Each call opens by saying it is recorded, calling hours are enforced so nobody is rung at dinner, and anyone who asks not to be called again goes on the do-not-call list. You get told what each call found: a payment date, a dispute you didn't know about, or "send it again, I never got it".

You approve from the report itself, so the list you have just read is the list you act on. Nothing is dialled until you switch it on.

Gary also tracks the two numbers Xero will not report: your average days to payment, and the share of invoiced value you actually collect. Both month by month for the last year, so you can see whether it is improving.

If you want the routine that goes around it, see reducing aged receivables, and what to do when Xero reminders aren't enough if yours are already on and being ignored.

Before you connect

The report reads your invoices and contacts. The one thing Gary writes back is a note on the invoice recording what happened on a call, and that is off by default. If you want to know what the permissions mean before clicking Allow, we wrote a guide on connecting apps to Xero. Already have an account? Sign in.