How to track overdue invoices in Xero as a team: seats, roles and one view

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A colleague can see overdue invoices in Xero on a Viewer login, and Xero charges no per-user fee. No Xero role adds an owner per account, shared notes or an internal alert, so teams add one live view on top of the ledger.

What Xero's Aged Receivables report shows one person

Xero's Aged Receivables Summary report shows the amount each customer owes and how long it has been outstanding, and the Detail report lists it invoice by invoice.

You can set the number and length of the ageing periods, age by due date or invoice date, add columns such as Credit Limit, group by Contact Group or tracking category, save the layout as a custom report and export it to PDF, Excel or Google Sheets.

Xero does not email a report on a schedule, compare a customer's balance with an earlier date, show days-to-pay on a contact record, or alert anyone inside the business when an account goes overdue or crosses a threshold. The request for automatic report emailing holds 780 votes on Xero's product ideas board and sits at "In discovery", with Xero's latest reply dated 25 May 2026 (checked 3 September 2026).

Every one of those views belongs to whoever is logged in. The report has no owner column and no place to record a promise to pay, so the first question for a team is who gets a Xero login. The wider set of reports is in credit control reporting in Xero.

What each Xero user role lets a colleague see

Xero names administrator, standard + reports, sales and purchases, sales and viewer as the roles that can open the Aged Receivables Summary report, and its plans carry no per-user licence fee. A seat for a colleague costs nothing extra.

Xero's user roles article lists Administrator, Standard, Employee, Viewer and four Sales and purchases variants. The Aged Receivables Summary article states: "You need the administrator, standard + reports, sales and purchases, sales or viewer user role to access this report."

"Not listed" means the role is absent from Xero's access line for that screen, which is different from a confirmed no. The Business Snapshot article names "administrator, standard + reports or viewer" for its dashboard.

Xero describes the Viewer role as able to "view most areas of Xero, but can't create or edit transactions, or run new reports". Read with the report's access line, a Viewer can open the saved receivables report and the snapshot, and sees most of the organisation while doing it.

Why teams still do not hand out Viewer seats

A Viewer seat costs nothing, and it opens most of Xero to whoever holds it rather than the receivables alone. No Xero role adds an account owner, notes on the report or an internal notification when an invoice goes overdue or gets paid.

Each gap has a thread on Xero's product ideas board, read on 3 September 2026. Scheduled reports sit at "In discovery", which means Xero is researching them.

The notes thread was posted against the payables report, and comments through November 2025 ask for the receivables side: "I need this more for Aged Receivables. One report to show the full picture." The assignment thread is a Xero Practice Manager request, and Xero's reply of 27 May 2026 says the team "can see the value in having a clearer way to show ownership during invoicing".

A free overdue invoice tracker template

Seven columns cover what a team needs to share: customer, overdue total, oldest invoice, owner, last contact, promise date and next action. The first three come from Xero's report and the other four are typed in by hand.

Header row to paste:

Customer, Overdue total, Oldest invoice, Owner, Last contact, Promise date, Next action

1. Run the Aged Receivables Detail report, aged by due date, with the Due Date and Invoice Seen columns showing.
2. Export it to Excel or Google Sheets. A Google Sheets export needs a Google account.
3. Add the four columns you type by hand: owner, last contact, promise date and next action.
4. Share the sheet and agree who re-runs the report, and on which day.

The sheet goes stale the moment it is saved. A payment that lands at 9am is not on it, and every refresh means re-running the report and re-pasting the figures around the four columns you typed. That upkeep is the subject of keeping a Xero debtors report current without rebuilding it in Excel each week.

Four ways to give a team the overdue picture

A Xero Viewer seat, a shared spreadsheet, a CRM board and a credit control layer on Xero can each put the overdue list in front of a team. They differ on who sees what, whether the figures stay in sync with the ledger and whether anyone owns each account.

The last column is Paidnice; the other three are categories.

A CRM board suits a sales team that already lives in it. The balance on its cards is only as current as the last sync, and its notes stay in the CRM unless something copies them back to the ledger.

How Paidnice gives the whole team one overdue view

Paidnice gives each colleague a login separate from Xero, with no per-seat fee (two users on Essentials, unlimited on Pro), and lets you assign invoices and escalations to a named person, with notes that sync back to the invoice in Xero.

Everyone who logs in sees the same receivables. Each contact page carries summary cards for outstanding and overdue balance, revenue, unpaid invoice count, oldest overdue age and average days to pay. The full list of metrics is on the accounts receivable reporting page.

Each invoice shows its total, outstanding amount, days overdue, expected payment date and status, and invoices sit in board-style ageing buckets with counts and totals. Each invoice also shows how many times its portal page has been viewed.

Ownership works through assignment. Assign an invoice or an escalation to a colleague and they get an Assignment notification; @mention someone in a note and they get a Mention notification. Notes and call outcomes sync to the invoice in Xero, so a colleague who only ever opens Xero still sees what was said. The notes and assignment release has the detail.

Escalations turn the overdue list into tasks with owners. A policy fires at a set number of days overdue, filtered by Minimum and Maximum Due Amount per invoice and by a due-date window, or when a customer's total balance passes a figure you set or a credit limit, and creates a Phone Call, Stop Credit or Template Legal Letter task. The instructions are emailed to a designated address and listed on the Escalations page.

The first overdue day is covered in the alert for the first overdue day, and amount thresholds in growing overdue balances in Xero. Reminders that reach the wrong department at one customer are covered in Xero invoice reminders for different departments.

The Emails report answers "did they get it?": it lists every message sent with its latest delivery status, delivered or bounced. The opt-in Weekly Report emails each user a summary of the organisation's receivables.

On Pro, webhooks fire on every completed or failed action and when an escalation completes or is cancelled, so alerts land in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram or WhatsApp through an incoming webhook that Paidnice sets up.

Paidnice has no read-only role today: every user you invite can see and act on the receivables, so invite the people who should be able to act.

1. Connect Xero. Contacts, invoices, payments and credit notes sync across.
2. Invite the team. Each person gets their own Paidnice login and needs no Xero seat, per the Paidnice help centre.
3. Set an escalation policy: the days overdue, the Minimum Due Amount, the task type and the address the instructions go to.
4. Assign and mention. Assign the escalation or invoice to its owner, and @mention colleagues in notes, which sync to the invoice in Xero.
5. Turn on the Weekly Report for each user, and on Pro add a webhook into Slack or Teams for completed and failed actions.

Paidnice is free to sign up, with the first 20 actions free and no credit card. Essentials is £49 or US$69 a month with two users, and Pro starts at £74 or US$99 a month with unlimited users, on the pricing page. Across Paidnice customers, eight in ten invoices get paid on time.

The pre-call view for an account manager

Before a call, an account manager needs the overdue balance, the oldest overdue invoice, the delivery status of the last reminder, the owner and the last note, and nothing from the rest of the ledger.

Xero gives an account manager one cue of its own when raising an invoice: hovering on the contact shows what the customer owes and the overdue part of it, and in new invoicing a banner appears once the contact reaches their credit limit.

The contact page in Paidnice is the pre-call view: overdue balance, oldest overdue age, average days to pay, each reminder's delivery status, the owner and the notes.

Common questions

How to follow up an overdue invoice?
Send a reminder on the due date, a firmer one at 7 and 14 days, then phone. Apply a late fee if your terms allow it, since an invoice that costs money to ignore moves up the payment run, and log each contact on the invoice.

Does Xero automatically send overdue invoices?
Xero sends invoice reminders automatically once they are turned on: up to five per organisation, to the primary person plus anyone with "Include in emails" selected, for every invoice marked as sent. Nobody inside your business is notified.

How to keep track of paid and unpaid invoices?
In Xero, run the Receivable Invoice Summary report in its "Approved, sent and paid" format for the period, and the Aged Receivables Summary for what is still open by customer. A connected app adds days overdue and expected payment date per invoice.

How to generate a report in Xero?
Open the report in Xero, set the date, ageing periods and columns, then click Save as custom to keep the layout, or Export to send it out as PDF, Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

How do I export a list of invoices from Xero?
Run the Receivable Invoice Summary or Aged Receivables Detail report and export it to PDF, Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Reports don't export to CSV. Contacts do, but the contact CSV carries no balance field.

Can a colleague see overdue invoices if they have no Xero login?
Not inside Xero: every user needs a login and a role, although Xero charges no per-user fee. Otherwise export the report and share it, or give them a login to a connected app such as Paidnice, which is separate from Xero.