Xero payment reminders by text: a step by step guide

Xero already knows which of your invoices are overdue and by how much. What it does not do well is get the customer to look at that fact. Its built-in email reminders land in the same inbox everyone ignores. Connecting Xero to SMS closes the gap: the invoice data Xero holds becomes a text message the customer actually reads, with a pay link that works.

This is a walk through of how it fits together and what to check before you turn it on.

What the connection actually does

Once SMS365 is connected to your Xero organisation, it watches for invoices that reach a state you care about, usually "overdue", and for invoices approaching their due date. When an invoice matches your rule, it builds a text using the fields Xero already holds: the customer name, the invoice number, the amount outstanding, and the online payment link Xero generates for that invoice.

That last part matters. The message contains the real Xero pay link, so the customer taps it and lands on the hosted payment page for that exact invoice. No "please log in to your account", no asking you to resend the PDF.

Hi Priya, invoice INV-2231 for $455.00 is now overdue. You can pay it securely here: [Xero pay link]. Thanks, Northside Electrical.

Deduped per invoice, so you never double-send

The risk with any automation that watches a live system is sending the same reminder twice because the invoice ticked over some state again, or a sync ran twice. SMS365 dedupes reminders per invoice, so a given invoice will not fire the same reminder more than once even if Xero reports it repeatedly. This is the difference between a customer thinking "fair enough, I am late" and thinking "these people cannot count and are hassling me". It protects the relationship as much as it protects your credit.

Setting it up, step by step

1. Connect Xero. Authorise SMS365 to read your invoices and contacts. It needs read access to invoices and the contact phone numbers, nothing more exotic.
2. Check your contact mobile numbers. A reminder can only go where there is a mobile number on the Xero contact. Run a quick check of your top debtors and fill in the gaps. This is the step most people skip and then wonder why coverage is patchy.
3. Pick your trigger. Decide what fires a message. A reminder three days before due, one on the due date, and one at three days overdue covers most businesses. Start with just the overdue trigger if you want to keep it simple.
4. Write the message. Use the merge fields for name, invoice number, amount and the pay link. Keep it under about 160 characters where you can so it stays a single segment and reads cleanly.
5. Send yourself a test. Put your own mobile on a dummy contact and confirm the link opens the right payment page. Never launch a reminder rule you have not seen arrive on a real phone.

Once those are set, the rule runs on its own. You will see reminders going out in your message history, and replies coming back to the same dedicated Australian number, because these are two-way. A customer who wants to query the amount can just reply to the text.

What to send, and when

The timing question deserves its own attention, and there is a full breakdown in setting up automatic overdue invoice reminders from Xero. The short version: send before it is a problem, not just after. A three-day-before nudge lifts on-time payment more than any overdue message does, because it reaches people while they still have the invoice in mind and before it drops off their list.

For the wording at each stage, from the gentle heads up to the firm day-fourteen follow up, the polite late payment reminder script gives you copy you can paste straight in.

Let the assistant handle the replies

The moment you make reminders two-way, you get replies. "What was this for?" "Can I pay half now?" "I paid that last week." SMS365's AI assistant can answer these by looking up the customer's invoice, and if they promise a date it can record a promise to pay against that invoice so the follow up is scheduled automatically. That turns the reminder from a one-way nag into something closer to a collections assistant that works after hours. If a reply needs a human, it lands in your inbox like any other text.

An honest word on delivery

SMS is opened far more reliably than email, which is the whole point, but no platform can guarantee a message reached the handset. SMS365 marks a message "sent" when it has been handed to the carrier, and only "delivered" when a genuine delivery receipt returns. That honesty is worth having, because it means the delivery status you see is real rather than assumed. For a customer whose message shows sent but not delivered, the two-way number gives you a second path.

The result

The work of chasing invoices moves from your Friday afternoon to a rule that runs itself. Xero holds the truth about who owes what, SMS gets that truth onto the customer's screen, and the pay link turns intention into a completed payment. If you want to see what running this costs against the debtor days it saves, the pricing page is prepaid with no lock-in, so you can trial it on your worst payers first.