How to Send a Remittance Advice in Xero (and What to Do When One Lands in Your Inbox)

A remittance advice is a short note that says "here is the payment, and here is exactly what it covers". In Xero there are two sides to it: the sending side, where you pay a supplier and want Xero to email proof of what you paid, and the receiving side, where a customer pays you and drops a remittance into your inbox for you to match. This guide covers the sending side properly first, because that is what most people are searching for, and then it deals honestly with the harder half.

If you came here to send a remittance after paying a bill, the next three sections answer that directly. The Xero steps are short. Sending a remittance advice is a two-minute job in Xero. Receiving one at volume is the job that eats your week, and we get to that near the end.

Sending a remittance advice for a single supplier payment

The simplest case is one bill, one payment. Xero builds the remittance advice into the payment record itself, so there is no separate template to load or add-on to install. Once the bill is recorded as paid, the option lives on the payment, not on the bill.

1. Open the paid bill. Go to Business, then Bills to pay, and open a bill that is fully or partly paid.
2. Open the payment. In the bill's history at the bottom, click the blue payment link (it reads "Payment: " followed by the contact name). That opens the payment transaction.
3. Click Options, then Send Remittance Advice. The Options button sits at the top of the payment screen. Send Remittance Advice opens a dialog with the supplier's email already filled in from their contact record.
4. Check the email and send. Confirm or edit the recipient, add a note if you want, tick "Send me a copy" to keep one for the file, and click Send.

The advice lists the payment date, the amount, the bank account, and each bill it settles with its reference. That is the whole point of the document: it lets the supplier tie your payment back to the right invoices without guessing. Hold that thought, because it is exactly the data the person on the receiving end has to reconcile, and we come back to it at the end.

Sending one remittance advice for a batch payment

Most teams do not pay bills one at a time. They run a batch: select every bill due this week, pay them in a single bank transfer, and send each supplier one advice instead of five. Xero handles this, but the remittance step lives somewhere people do not expect, so it is worth walking through in two halves: pay the batch, then send the remittance.

Build and pay the batch

1. Select the bills. Go to Business, then Bills to pay, and tick every approved, awaiting-payment bill you want to include.
2. Make the payment. Click Make Payment to start the batch. Choose the bank account, set the payment date, and pick how you are paying: Create a payment file (a bank file, such as an ABA, that you upload to your bank) or Mark as paid if the money has already gone out. Click Create Payment.

Xero now records the whole batch as one transaction. In the bank account it appears as Payment: multiple items, and that single line is what you later reconcile against the matching debit on your bank feed.

Send the remittance for the batch

1. Open the batch payment. Go to Accounting, then Bank accounts, open the account you paid from, and find the Payment: multiple items line under Account transactions. Click it.
2. Click Send Remittance. The batch payment screen carries a Send Remittance button. Xero generates one advice per supplier in the batch and emails them in a single action, so a batch covering eight suppliers sends eight separate advices, each showing only that supplier's bills.
3. Confirm and send. Review the recipients, tick "Send me a copy" if you want the full set for your records, and send.

Two limits are worth knowing before you rely on this. Xero produces one remittance per contact, so a supplier with several bills in the batch gets one combined advice and you cannot split it back to one-per-bill. And batches that include an overpayment or an applied credit can render awkwardly on the advice, so eyeball those before sending.

When the remittance does not send, and how to get the PDF

Two things commonly go wrong, and neither is a real problem.

• No email address on the contact. Xero cannot send to an address it does not hold. Open the supplier's contact record, add an email under their details, save, then go back to the payment and send again.
• You clicked past it at payment time. Sending is not part of recording the payment, and there is no deadline. The advice can be generated from the payment whenever you need it.

To get the PDF without emailing, open the payment and use the Options menu. On a single payment, choose View Remittance (PDF). Xero builds it from the live payment record, so it always reflects what was actually paid. Save it for the file, or forward it yourself to a supplier who only accepts remittances through their own portal. To resend, just run Send Remittance Advice from the payment again; there is no limit on how many times you can send it.

Customising the Xero remittance advice template

People search for a "Xero remittance template" expecting a freely editable document. It is more constrained than that, so here is what is actually adjustable.

The advice prints on your standard invoice branding theme. Set one up under Settings, then Invoice settings, and the logo, organisation name, address, and basic fonts and colours carry across to remittances automatically. If you have not set a standard theme, the advice prints on a plain unbranded template. You can also save a reusable covering message under Settings, then Email settings, so you are not retyping it every time.

What you cannot do natively is redesign the body. The advanced (DOCX) invoice templates that let you rebuild invoice layouts do not apply to remittance advice, and the fields it shows (payment date, amount, bills covered, references, total) are fixed. For the overwhelming majority of suppliers that is exactly right, because the document's job is to be unambiguous rather than branded. If you genuinely need a bespoke layout, that is a job for a Xero App Store add-on rather than a built-in setting. And if a supplier insists on their own format, you will usually end up filling in their portal by hand, a reminder that remittance formats are not standardised across the market.

The other side of the desk: when a remittance lands in your AR inbox

Everything above is the easy half. Now flip the desk around. You are no longer paying a supplier; you are the supplier, and one of your customers has just paid you and sent a remittance advice to prove it. Sending was a two-minute job for them. Receiving it is a different job entirely, and it does not live in the payment screen.

Receiving a remittance is a matching job, not a sending job. The note tells you the customer paid, say, A$58,240. It does not reconcile itself. You have to read every invoice line on the advice, find each invoice in your open AR in Xero, allocate the right portion to each one, account for any short-payments or deductions, and then match the whole allocation against the single credit sitting on your bank feed. A remittance advice is not really a document problem; it is a reconciliation problem wearing a document's clothing.

At a handful per week, this is fine. Open the advice, open Xero side by side, tick off the invoices, done in a few minutes. The trouble is volume and length. Consider a food wholesaler that supplies a national grocery chain. The grocer pays once a fortnight and sends a 12-page remittance covering 180-odd invoices, some short-paid by a few dollars for damaged stock, one offset by a promotional rebate. That single bank credit has to be split across all of them, line by line, and every deduction has to be explained. What was a two-minute job on the sending side is now most of an afternoon on the receiving side, repeated every fortnight.

It gets sharper at the top end. Xero's batch payment screen has a hard ceiling on how many invoices it will take, so a remittance that runs past it cannot be allocated in one go at all. We cover that trap in Xero's 200-invoice batch payment limit. The step-by-step of doing the allocation by hand, side by side with the bank feed, is in how to reconcile a remittance advice in Xero.

This is the half that automation actually helps with. Extraction reads every invoice line off the incoming advice, matches each one against your open AR invoices in Xero, handles the short-payments and offsets, and lets you review the allocations before they post, so a 12-page remittance becomes a quick check rather than an afternoon. That is the job RemitClear's Xero remittance matching is built for. To be clear, that is the receiving side. Sending a remittance to your own suppliers stays exactly where it is, in Xero's payment screen, and the steps at the top of this post are all you need for it.

Summary

Sending a remittance advice in Xero is genuinely a small task. Record the payment (or the batch payment), take the prompt, confirm the supplier's email, and send. If it does not go out, it is almost always a missing email address or a skipped prompt, and you can resend or download the PDF from the paid bill at any time. Branding carries across from your invoice theme; the layout itself is fixed and that is fine.

The hard half is the one nobody searches for until it is hurting them: what to do when a remittance lands in your inbox. That is a reconciliation job, and at volume it scales badly, especially once a single advice runs to dozens or hundreds of invoices with deductions sprinkled through it. Sending is a two-minute job. Receiving one at volume is the job that eats your week, and it is the half worth automating.