An outsourced AR service runs the invoice-to-cash cycle on your behalf: issuing invoices accurately and on schedule, enabling online payment options, sending structured reminders and making follow-up calls, reviewing aged receivables, applying incoming cash against the right invoices, and reconciling the receivables ledger. The commercial decisions — who gets credit terms, whether to agree a payment plan, when to write off a balance — stay with the business owner. The provider supplies the process and the discipline.

Xero's native reminders are free, quick to configure, and adequate for many small businesses with a modest customer base who mostly pay near terms. Their limits are specific: they're email-only, capped at a small number of stages, and they send from Xero's domain rather than your own address, which makes them read as automated.

A dedicated Xero-native AR app addresses exactly those gaps — reminders sent from your own email address with your branding, multi-channel chasing including SMS and phone, unlimited segmented workflows for different customer types, automated late fees, and a customer payment portal. A reasonable threshold: if your reminder ladder needs more than three steps, more than one channel, or different versions for different customer segments, the native tool is no longer sufficient.

Not unless you want them to. Reminders go out under your business name, from your domain, with your branding and in the tone you've approved. Where calls form part of the ladder, we can introduce ourselves either as your accounts team or as your outsourced finance partner, depending on your preference. Most clients choose the former for routine chasing, because customers respond to it as normal business communication rather than as escalation.

Four levers, roughly in order of impact for most small businesses. First, invoice faster — terms don't start until the invoice arrives, so billing delay is pure added DSO. Second, add pre-due-date reminders, which catch invoices lost inside the customer's own approval process before they're ever late. Third, remove friction from paying by enabling card, ACH or direct debit directly on the invoice. Fourth, apply your terms consistently across all customers, since selectively enforced terms teach customers that the due date is negotiable.

Chasing harder after the fact is the least effective lever, which is why it's the one most businesses reach for first.

The one sent a few days before the due date. It isn't chasing, so it carries no relationship cost, and it catches the most common cause of late payment: an invoice that never made it into the customer's own approval queue. By the time an invoice is overdue, you're solving a problem that a short courtesy note a week earlier would have prevented entirely.

Yes, and the ladder should include it. Email works until it stops working — once a customer has ignored two written reminders, a third rarely changes anything. A call surfaces what email cannot: an unresolved dispute, a missing PO, a change of contact, or genuine financial difficulty that might be better addressed with a payment plan than with escalation. In our standard ladder, a call comes around two weeks after the due date.

No. We provide credit control as part of your accounting function — reminders, statements, calls and structured escalation on your behalf. Third-party debt collection is a separately regulated activity with its own licensing and conduct requirements. When an account reaches the point of formal recovery, we hand it to you with the complete communication history so you can instruct a licensed collection agency or your attorney with everything already documented.

Unidentified receipts are matched by amount, timing and customer history against open invoices; where that isn't conclusive we contact the customer to confirm what the payment relates to rather than guessing. Nothing is left parked in suspense from one month to the next. Getting this right is what makes the aged report trustworthy — and prevents the most damaging AR error, which is sending a demanding reminder to a customer who has already paid.

We help you build a credit policy covering who gets terms versus upfront payment, what a new customer must provide before terms are granted, the balance ceiling before new work pauses, and who can override it. Where it's warranted, we can also set up credit monitoring so a deteriorating customer surfaces early. The decision to extend, hold or withdraw credit is always yours — we supply the information and apply the policy you set.

Yes. Non-profit receivables often look different from commercial AR — grant installments, pledges, membership dues and program fees rather than straightforward trade invoices, each with its own timing and recognition treatment. We configure Xero so restricted and unrestricted income is coded correctly at the point of invoicing, and we tailor the follow-up approach, since chasing a foundation on a scheduled grant payment is a different conversation from chasing a late commercial customer.

AR management is priced as an add-on to a Xero bookkeeping package, scoped on invoice volume, active customer count, number of entities and how much chasing your customer base actually requires. It isn't sold standalone, because managing receivables properly requires ownership of the ledger and the reconciliation as well. We'll quote after a short review of your current aging and process.