A remittance advice is a short note that says here is the payment and here is exactly what it covers. Xero builds one into the payment record itself, so once you've paid a supplier the advice is a couple of clicks off that payment, with no template to load and no add-on to install. That's the sending side and it's quick. The receiving side works the other way round, because a customer pays you, drops a remittance into your inbox, and you're the one matching it line by line against a single bank credit, which takes a few minutes for one and most of an afternoon at volume.
If you came here to send a remittance after paying a bill, the next three sections cover it, and the Xero steps are short, a two-minute job once you know where they live. The part that costs a finance team a week is the reverse, receiving one at volume.
Sending a remittance advice for a single supplier payment
The simplest case is one bill, one payment. Once the bill is recorded as paid, the send option lives on the payment rather than on the bill, which is the bit that sends people hunting.
- Open the paid bill. Go to Business, then Bills to pay, and open a bill that is fully or partly paid.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, which is what lets the supplier tie your payment back to the right invoices without guessing. It's also the data the person on the receiving end has to reconcile.
One Xero remittance advice for multiple payments, the batch route
Most teams don't pay bills one at a time, they run a batch, selecting every bill due this week, paying them in a single bank transfer, and sending each supplier one advice instead of five. Xero handles that, but the remittance step lives somewhere people don't expect, so it's worth taking in two halves, paying the batch and then sending the remittance.
Build and pay the batch
- Select the bills. Go to Business, then Bills to pay, and tick every approved, awaiting-payment bill you want to include.
- 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 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 can't 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.
One batch payment is one bank line and it can cover dozens of invoices. On the receiving side that's the whole problem, because a single credit sits on your bank feed and a long list of invoices has to be split out of it.
When the remittance does not send, and how to get the PDF
Two things commonly go wrong, and neither is much of a problem.
- No email address on the contact. Xero can't send to an address it doesn't 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 isn't part of recording the payment, and there's 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 paid. Save it for the file, or forward it yourself to a supplier who only accepts remittances through their own portal. To resend, run Send Remittance Advice from the payment again, and there's no limit on how many times you can send it.
Changing how Xero's remittance advice looks
People expect a freely editable document here, and Xero is narrower than that.
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 haven't 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're not retyping it every time.
What you can't do natively is redesign the body. The advanced (DOCX) invoice templates that let you rebuild invoice layouts don't 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's fine, because what they need from the document is an unambiguous list of what you've paid. And if a supplier insists on their own format, you'll usually end up filling in their portal by hand, which is a reminder that remittance formats aren't standardised across the market.
For the cases the built-in advice can't cover, there's our free, editable remittance advice template (Word and Excel, plus a filled-in example). It fits payments made outside Xero, where there's no payment record yet to generate an advice from, suppliers who need information Xero's fixed fields can't show, and anyone who simply wants a document they control.
When a remittance lands in your own AR inbox
Everything above is the easy half, so now swap sides. You're not paying a supplier any more, you're the supplier, and one of your customers has just paid you and sent a remittance advice to prove it. It was a two-minute job for them, and receiving it is a different job entirely, one that doesn't live in the payment screen.
Receiving a remittance is a matching job. The note tells you the customer paid, say, $58,240, and none of that reconciles on its own, so 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, which is reconciliation work however much it looks like a document.
At a handful a week this is fine, you open the advice, open Xero beside it, tick off the invoices and you're done in a few minutes, and it's volume and length that break it. Take a food wholesaler supplying a national grocer. The grocer pays once a fortnight and sends a 12-page remittance covering 180-odd invoices, a handful short-paid on a delivery shortage, one offset by a promotional rebate. That single bank credit has to be split across all of them, line by line, and every deduction explained, so what was a two-minute job on the sending side becomes most of an afternoon on the receiving side, repeated every fortnight.
At the top end it gets harder still, because Xero's batch payment screen has a hard ceiling on how many invoices it will take, so a remittance that runs past it can't 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. When one advice covers a long list of invoices, multi-invoice payment matching for Xero is the page for that job, and when the reverse happens and one remittance arrives as several bank deposits, see reconciling split payments in Xero.
Automation earns its place on this half. RemitClear's Xero remittance matching takes the incoming advice, pulls every invoice line off it, allocates each one against your open AR in Xero and carries the short-payments and offsets through, then puts the whole allocation in front of you to approve before anything posts, so a 12-page advice collapses into a quick check. Sending a remittance to your own suppliers stays where it already is, in Xero's payment screen, and the steps at the top of this post are all you need for that.
There's one more use for that template, and it belongs on this side. If your customers send you messy remittances (combined lines, netted deductions, references that match nothing), share it with them as the format you'd like to receive. Every rule that makes an advice easy for a person to reconcile, one line per invoice, exact numbers, deductions in a column of their own, a reference that ties to the bank transfer, also makes it easier for software to match automatically. Your worst payers won't adopt it, but the merely disorganised ones often will, and every one that does takes work out of your fortnight.
Summary
In Xero, sending a remittance is record-keeping and it's a couple of minutes' work. The send lives on the payment or batch screen, resends and PDFs come off the paid bill whenever you want, and the branding rides in from your invoice theme. Receiving one is reconciliation work, so the moment a customer's advice lands in your own inbox you're back to splitting one credit across a long list by hand, and that's the half that repays automating.