A Weekly Getting-Paid Routine for Trade Businesses on Xero

The businesses that get paid on time aren't usually tougher with their customers. They just have a routine. Following up stops being a mood ("I must get onto that") and becomes a job on the calendar, like ordering stock.

Here's the routine I'd run for a trade business on Xero: a couple of minutes on job days, about half an hour on Monday morning, and a short check at the end of the month. Each step gives the Xero menu, so you can follow along.

On job days: invoice before you forget

• Invoice the day the job is finished. The sooner it lands, the sooner your payment terms start counting. If they use order numbers, put the number on the invoice. An invoice without one can sit in their accounts team's queue until you fix it.
• Send it from Xero, or mark it as sent. If you send invoices some other way, mark them as sent in Xero. Xero's own reminders only go out on invoices marked as sent.
• Make paying easy. In Xero, go to Sales → Online payments and connect a payment service. Your invoices then get a Pay Now button, and the customer doesn't need a Xero login to use it. The payment provider charges its own fees, separate from your Xero subscription. When a customer pays online, Xero marks the invoice as paid, but it doesn't tell you, so the Monday check still matters.

Monday morning: the half-hour follow-up

1. Reconcile your bank first

Before you follow anyone up, make sure Xero knows who has already paid. Go to your bank account's Reconcile tab (the bank account panel on your Xero dashboard shows how many items are waiting) and match each incoming payment to its invoice. An invoice paid by bank transfer stays "owing" in Xero until you match the payment to it, and the most awkward follow-up there is goes to a customer who paid you last Thursday.

2. Run the aged receivables report

Go to Reporting → All reports and open the Aged Receivables Summary. Set Ageing By to Due Date, so each amount sits in the column for how overdue it is, not how old the invoice is. Click a customer's amount to see the individual invoices behind it.

That report is your to-do list for the morning.

3. Work the list, oldest and largest first

Follow each invoice up according to how overdue it is: a friendly heads-up before it's due, a light reminder just after, a request for a payment date at a week, and a phone call at two weeks. Here's the full schedule, with the words to use at each stage. The point of doing it on Monday is that nothing gets skipped because you were busy.

4. Write down what you were told

On the invoice in Xero, click Add note and record what happened: who you spoke to, and the date they gave you. Notes are only visible inside your Xero organisation, and once saved they can't be edited or deleted, so keep them factual. Next Monday, the note tells you whether a promise was kept.

5. If the invoice is wrong, fix it

Sometimes the reason for the silence is a problem with the invoice: wrong amount, missing order number, a variation they didn't agree to. Another reminder won't move that. Sort out the problem, correct the invoice or raise a credit note, and send the fixed version.

End of the month: statements and the long tail

• Send statements to anyone who owes you. Some accounts teams pay from statements rather than invoices. Go to Contacts → Customers, open the menu at the top right and choose Send statements. Pick the Outstanding statement type, which shows only what's owed, then tick the customers and click Email. You can send them all at once.
• Decide what to do about anything badly overdue. Don't let it drift for another month. A payment plan, a final notice, your state's tribunal or a debt collector are all options. The follow-up guide covers them. Talk to your accountant or bookkeeper before you write a debt off.

Before the next job

• Put your payment terms on the quote. Xero quotes have their own terms section, and terms the customer agreed to up front are much easier to hold them to.
• Take a deposit on big jobs. It limits how much you're owed if things go wrong.
• Check a big customer before you start. Australia's large businesses have to report how fast they pay small suppliers. Here's what that data shows, and how to look a customer up.

Let something else send the routine reminders

You don't have to send every email yourself. If you don't use a follow-up app, Xero's built-in invoice reminders can send the before-due and just-overdue emails for free. Here's how to set them up properly. Your Monday half hour is then for the invoices that need a person: the calls, the disputes and the promises.

Use one or the other, not both. If you switch to an app that sends its own reminders, turn Xero's off first, or your customers will get two emails about the same invoice.

Where Unpaid fits

I built Unpaid to run this routine with you. It connects to Xero, and every Monday morning it emails you a weekly summary: how many reminders went out and what needs you, including follow-ups waiting for your approval and overdue invoices with no reminders currently lined up. It drafts each follow-up for each overdue invoice and waits for you to approve it before anything is sent. When a customer replies, it reads the reply and pauses that invoice's reminders if there's a dispute or a question. And if Xero's own reminders are still switched on when you connect, it tells you, so nobody gets two.

There's a 14-day free trial. But the routine above works just as well with a calendar reminder for Monday morning. What matters is that you run it every week.