Xero bills due: a weekly digest, drafted for your approval

Xero stores every supplier bill with a due date, but the date helps if someone looks. Bills arrive by email, get approved, and wait. Nothing reminds the person who pays them. A short weekly list fixes this: what falls due this week, what falls due next week, and what is already late. The list is small enough to act on in ten minutes and regular enough to trust.

You add the job and grant read access to your Xero organisation. Each Monday a scheduled agent requests invoices of type ACCPAY, which is how the Xero accounting API marks supplier bills, and filters to those that are authorised but not yet paid. For each bill it reads the contact, due date, total and amount due. It groups the results into overdue, due in the next seven days, and due after that up to your look-ahead window (14 days by default, so the second group stretches if you change it). It totals each group and flags any single bill above the amount you set. It reads and reports. It does not approve, pay, edit or delete a bill.

Before the digest reaches you, the department head agent checks it: do the group totals match the sum of the lines, is any bill counted twice, and are partly paid bills shown at the amount still due rather than the full total. Then you approve, edit or skip the digest, and nothing is delivered until you do. Use the notes field for suppliers you pay on a fixed day, so they stop looking urgent.

Treat the digest as the agenda for your weekly payment run. Pay the overdue group before the rest, schedule the next group, and query anything unfamiliar before it is paid. If the same supplier appears as overdue week after week, check whether the due date on the bill is wrong rather than paying late again. The digest also gives a rough cash need for the fortnight, which is useful when you decide how much to move into the paying account.