One of the most common accounting problems for most small businesses that issue invoices to their clients is matching payments to invoices especially for customers that buy from you on a consistent basis.
It is pretty common for customers to miss an invoice or part pay another and it can be a time consuming exercise to reconcile their account.
A little known feature in Xero is that your customers can create an account in Xero so that they can see and download all their outstanding invoices.
When you send an invoice using the Xero email system, the email contains a link so that your client can pay online but that link also enables them to create an account and see all their outstanding invoices. Making it much easier for them and for you.
We have a step by step process as a PDF that you can download and just send to your clients so that they can quickly set up their own account and view their outstanding invoices and statements.
Download the Full Procedure as PDF
One of the most common accounting problems most small businesses who issue invoices to their clients is matching payments to the invoices especially those customers who buy from you on a consistent basis.
It is pretty common for those customers to miss an invoice, or part pay one and it can be a time consuming exercise to reconcile their account.
A little know feature in Xero is that your customers can create an account in Xero so that they can see and download all their outstanding invoices.
So when you send an invoice using Xero email system the email contains a link so the client can pay on line but that link also enables them to create and account to see all their outstanding invoices making it much easier for them and for you.
Let’s see how that works. We go to ‘General Settings” and we click on ‘Email Settings’ and there will be various templates you can change. We will just look at the basic sales invoice template and this is one you send out when you are sending out invoices.
It has here ‘On line’ invoice link so let’s find and invoice and send it out and I will show you what I mean.
We will take this client here, ‘Small Business Services’ and we are going to email them an outstanding invoice and we will email them this invoice so we can send this to one of our email accounts.
The client will receive and invoice like this with the invoice attached to the PDF document and it will also have a link in here which is to the Xero system so they can view it and pay it on line.
We will just copy that hyperlink and open it in another browser and we can see they can both pay that now, by using Paypal or Eway if you have that set up, - we can talk about that in another video - and we can also see the outstanding bills, so we will just click on this one and we have an option here if they are already a Xero client to just log in and it will show or they can create a free login.
Let’s go through the ‘Create a free login’ process and it will ask you to confirm your email address so we will do that now. They will send you an email to confirm it so we will get another email like this.
We will just copy this one and give it a password and click back to this one – yes continue and we can see all the invoices that are available and we can also download and activity statement so we can see all the movements that have happened in that account over time so we can open or download it.
We can also open up these other invoices and see what is available and see what’s there and also pay them on line.
So it is a really helpful hint to be able to – especially when you have some large accounts and you have a number of different invoices and they are all over the place in terms of some goods may not have been delivered or they might be late and this is a very easy way to reconcile those accounts.