Solved: Parent-child customers in Xero: How to send one consolidated statement across grouped companies

If you sell into customers with a head office and multiple branches (franchises, dealer groups, hospitality groups, multi-site retailers, holding companies and their subsidiaries), you've probably hit the same wall. Xero treats every contact as a standalone record. There is no native concept of a parent customer and child customers underneath it. When the head office asks for "one statement that shows everything we owe across all our locations," you end up exporting, copying, and gluing it together by hand.

You're not alone in wanting this fixed. The request for parent-child contact hierarchies and consolidated statements has been on Xero's product ideas board since 2024, with comments still rolling in from food manufacturers, automotive workshops, ships agents, membership organizations, and wholesale distributors. The closely related thread asking why Xero doesn't have customer sub-accounts has been active for years.

This article walks through the workflow the requests are really describing, why the common workarounds break down, and how Paidnice now solves it on top of your existing Xero account, with no migration and no duplicate contacts.

Video overview of how to setup Parent-Child customers in Xero (via Paidnice)

The problem in one sentence

Your customer is one company; Xero sees it as many.

A parent customer (call it City Agency) has children: Bayside Club, City Limousines, North Branch, and South Branch. Each child receives its own invoices, often through your order management or POS system, and those invoices flow into Xero as separate contacts. That's correct: each location may have its own ABN, address, contact person, and PO process. But at the end of the month, the head office wants a single statement showing every open invoice across every location, and the credit controller at your end wants a single view of how much that group owes in total.

Xero's customer statement is tied to one contact. So you either:

• Send several statements to the same email address and hope nothing gets missed.
• Manually export each child's aged receivables into a spreadsheet, sum it, and email a PDF.
• Create a fake "umbrella" contact and re-key the invoices, which breaks reconciliation against the children.

None of these scale. One commenter on the Xero ideas thread put it plainly: "I have over 1,000 accounts, 26 groups. It takes forever to send statements."

Why workarounds break

The patterns most teams reach for first all have an edge case that bites.

Duplicating the customer in Xero. You create "City Agency Consolidated" as a separate contact and copy invoices across. Now your AR ledger double-counts the receivable, and payments applied to one version don't clear the other.

Tags and contact groups. Xero contact groups let you filter and bulk-send, but they don't roll up invoices into a single statement document. Each contact in the group still gets its own statement.

Spreadsheet aggregation. Works once. Falls apart by the third month. Different month-end dates, payments in flight, partial settlements, and credit notes turn it into a manual reconciliation exercise.

The cleaner answer is to keep Xero as the system of record for contacts and invoices, and layer the parent-child logic on top in the system that already sends your statements and reminders.

What Paidnice's Parent-Child Customers feature does

Paidnice is accounts receivable automation that sits on top of Xero and QuickBooks. It handles your reminders, statements, late fees, and customer portal so your finance team isn't following up on overdue invoices by hand. As of today, Parent-Child Customers for Xero is live on every Paidnice plan and account, with no extra cost and nothing to opt in to. It brings QuickBooks-style customer hierarchies into Paidnice without changing anything in your Xero contact list.

Here's what it changes in practice.

- You set the hierarchy in Paidnice. Pick the parent customer (City Agency) and assign children to it (Bayside Club, City Limousines). Your Xero contacts stay exactly as they are. Each child keeps its own invoices, payments, and history. Paidnice just knows they belong together.

- Statements roll up to the parent. When Paidnice generates a statement for City Agency, the PDF includes every open invoice across all of its children. One document, sent to the head office, with each line still attributable to the location that incurred it. Aged buckets are calculated against the consolidated balance, so the total you're following up on is the total the group actually owes.

- The customer portal shows the full picture. Head office logs in once and sees every child's invoices in a single view. If you're using Stripe Payments through Paidnice, they can pay the consolidated balance in one transaction, and Paidnice splits the payment correctly against the child invoices in Xero.

- Policy controls live at the parent level. Statement schedules, late fee rules, and interest charges can be set to apply at the parent only, so a single group doesn't get five overlapping statement runs. The children stay clean records in Xero; the customer-facing communication consolidates upstream.

This is the workflow the Xero ideas board has been describing for two years: a way to keep separate legal/operational records per location while presenting a unified balance to the customer who actually pays the bill.

Feedback from the community

The release has been live for less than a day and the first reviews are already in. Ian S., writing on the Xero App Store on launch day, 28 May 2026:

Ian's setup is exactly the pattern this is built for: a configured rules engine handling the routine AR work, with the new parent-child layer collapsing multiple branch accounts onto one head office statement.

Who this is built for

If any of these describe how you bill, the feature is aimed at you.

A multi-site customer with a single head office that pays: franchises, hospitality groups, dealer networks, healthcare chains. A parent holding company with multiple operating entities that share a credit line. A wholesale distributor selling to retail chains where each store receives its own invoices but corporate consolidates payment. A membership organization invoicing branches that report up to a central body. A B2B seller whose order management system (BigCommerce, Shopify, NetSuite, an ERP, or a custom POS) creates a contact per location in Xero, exactly the pattern described in the original Xero ideas thread.

Accountants and bookkeepers running this for multiple clients see the saving most clearly. The hour-per-month-per-client of statement gymnastics adds up fast across a book.

How to turn it on

Parent-Child Customers for Xero is live today, on every plan, for every Paidnice account connected to Xero. There's no waitlist, no add-on charge, and no migration step. Open any customer in Paidnice, set its parent, and the next statement run will roll up consolidated invoices, statements, and portal views accordingly. If you're not on Paidnice yet, you can install it from the Xero App Store. Setup takes about 15 minutes, and your existing contacts and invoices stay where they are.

A note on what this is and isn't. Parent-Child Customers consolidates customer-side billing communication: statements, reminders, portal, payments. It is not group financial consolidation (consolidating two Xero organizations into one set of group financials).

The point of Paidnice has always been to automate the awkward, repetitive part of getting paid without forcing you to change the platform you already run on. Parent-child customer hierarchies were one of the last big workflow gaps for Xero teams selling into multi-site customers. This closes it.

See how Paidnice works with Xero → paidnice.com/xero