Xero invoice reminders by contact group

Summary

No. Xero contact groups sort customers for filtering, bulk invoicing and reporting, but the reminder schedule belongs to the organisation and never reads which group a contact sits in. Moving someone into a group changes nothing about the reminders they receive. The only native workaround is switching reminders off for an entire group.

• What groups do: A Xero contact group filters the contact list, sends one invoice to every member, applies a bulk action and slices a report. Chasing is not on that list.
• The workaround: Select a group, turn reminders off for everyone in it, and chase those customers by hand.
• The fix: Paidnice gives each Xero contact group its own reminder sequence, and auto-assign keeps membership in step with Xero on every sync.

Contents▾

How do Xero's invoice reminders work?

Xero holds one reminder schedule at organisation level. You can have up to five reminders in it, and Xero sets three of them up for you when you first turn the feature on. Every reminder fires against every invoice marked as sent.

Each reminder goes to the primary person on the contact plus anyone with "Include in emails" selected. The only balance control is a checkbox, Don't send reminders for amounts owing on an invoice under, and Xero applies that setting to all reminders. Xero's own setup article tells readers to search the Xero App Store for apps that allow more advanced invoice reminder options.

Routing exists because segments behave differently. Xero Small Business Insights shows the industry spread.

Xero Small Business Insights · Australia · June 2026

Average time to be paid: slowest and fastest industries

Industry	Time to be paid
Mining	31.3 days
Public Administration and Safety	29.3 days
Manufacturing	29.2 days
All industries	20.3 days
Health Care and Social Assistance	12.0 days
Accommodation and Food Services	8.3 days

One schedule across that range is either too soft or too hard for most of the ledger.

What does a Xero contact group actually control?

A Xero contact group is a saved selection of contacts that does four things: filtering the contact list, sending the same invoice to a set of customers, applying a bulk action, and slicing a report. Reminder behaviour is not part of it.

The reason is structural rather than an oversight. Xero's reminder settings live under Sales, attached to the organisation, and they are evaluated against the invoice. The group lives on the contact. The two never meet.

How do you add a contact to a group in Xero?

Adding a contact to a Xero group takes four steps under Contacts, and the groups are still worth building because a connected app can read them later.

1. Go to Contacts, then All contacts.
2. Select New Group in the left panel and name it. Names such as "Retainer clients" or "Cash on delivery" survive a change of staff better than initials.
3. Tick the contacts you want, then choose Add to group.
4. Open the group from the left panel any time to check who is in it.

A contact can sit in more than one group, which is helpful for reporting and a problem for automation. If you intend to run different reminder rules per group later, keep one group per customer for that purpose and use tags for everything else.

Can different Xero contact groups get different reminder schedules?

No. Xero cannot run different reminder schedules for different contact groups. One schedule of up to five reminders applies to the whole organisation, and a contact group cannot change its timing, wording or sender.

The controls Xero does offer are blunt. Reminders can be switched off for the whole organisation, a single contact or a single invoice, and one minimum-amount threshold applies to every reminder. There is no SMS channel and no scheduled statement run alongside the reminders.

So if group A should get reminders at day 3, 10 and 20 while group B waits until day 14, Xero cannot do it. Both groups get the organisation's schedule, or one of them gets nothing. Per-group timing needs a connected app that keeps the group as the unit the policy attaches to, which is the setup in the Paidnice section below. The wider question of sending different invoice reminders to different customers, on any axis, has its own guide.

What is the only workaround inside Xero?

The only workaround inside Xero is to open the contact group, select every contact in it, and switch invoice reminders off. That group is then out of the automated schedule, and you follow them up manually.

It works for a short exclusion list. It stops working the moment the group is large, because you have moved the work rather than removed it, and nothing records who is exempt or why. The most common version of this is a "do not auto-remind" spreadsheet living next to Xero, updated by one person, and out of date within a month.

Where does the request stand with Xero?

The idea "Invoice Reminders - Set up for a Contact group" on Xero's product ideas board was posted on 30 August 2022, holds 42 votes, and carries the status "Accepted" after an official reply on 14 September 2026. That reply said no.

Xero community manager Kelly Munro wrote: "Being open at this stage we don't have plans for this". She pointed instead to JAX, the agent Xero is building, which "will create a personalised plan for each customer you turn it on for" and follow up "through the medium that is most likely to drive payment", adding that it is "not at a contact group level". The earlier reply, on 17 April 2025, had said the product team "have started research for the future of Invoice reminders".

The same research reply appears on the request to raise the five-reminder cap, which moved to "In development" on 31 August 2026. Xero's own setup article takes the practical line and tells readers to search the Xero App Store for apps offering more advanced reminder options.

Which contact groups are worth splitting reminders on?

Most businesses need three or four reminder groups, not fifteen. The test for each group is whether membership changes what you would do when an invoice goes past due.

How does Paidnice give each Xero contact group its own sequence?

Paidnice sits on top of Xero and keeps groups as the organising unit. Every policy, whether a reminder sequence, a statement schedule or a late fee, belongs to a group, so different groups run different rules at the same time.

1. Connect Xero. Your existing contact groups come across with the contacts.
2. Create a group per segment in Paidnice, mapped to the Xero group name or built on tags.
3. Add a reminder policy to each group with its own days, wording, sender and copied recipients.
4. Turn on auto-assign so a contact moved into a Xero group joins the matching Paidnice group on the next sync.

That last step is what keeps the setup alive. Group membership is maintained where your team already works, in Xero, and the reminder behaviour follows automatically. Nobody has to remember two systems. Splits by location and overdue balance use the same mechanism.

The same group structure drives automatic statements and late fees, so a customer set up once behaves consistently across everything you send. Paidnice starts at £49 a month for 150 invoices, with unlimited users on Pro.

Other ways to split your reminders

Group is one axis. Three others come up as often: customer location or region, total overdue balance, and one contact who sits behind several Xero customer records. The overview of all four is in different Xero invoice reminders for different customers.

Common questions

Can I set up Xero invoice reminders for a contact group?
No. Xero reminders are an organisation-level setting applied to every invoice marked as sent, and they do not read contact groups. Xero replied to the request on 14 September 2026 that it has no plans to add this.

What can I do with a Xero contact group instead?
Filter contacts, send one invoice to the whole group, apply a bulk action such as switching reminders off, and slice reports. Groups are also readable by connected apps, which is how per-group reminder sequences become possible.

How do I add a contact to a group in Xero?
Go to Contacts, All contacts, select the contacts you want, then choose Add to group. New groups are created from the left panel with New Group.

If I turn reminders off for a group, how do I find them again later?
Xero has no single list of contacts with reminders switched off, which is an open request in its own right. Keep the exclusion recorded somewhere you will actually look, or manage exclusions in a connected app where the group is visible.

Will moving a contact between groups change their reminders automatically?
Not in Xero, because groups do not drive reminders at all. In Paidnice, group auto-assign picks the change up on the next sync and the contact moves onto that group's sequence.

How do I stop Xero from sending invoice reminders?
Turn them off for the organisation in the Invoice Reminders screen, for one contact on the contact record, or for a single invoice from the Awaiting Payment tab. Xero has no screen listing which contacts you have excluded.