Xero builds the remittance advice into the payment record itself: pay a supplier, and 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 genuinely quick. The receiving side is a different animal, a customer pays you, drops a remittance into your inbox, and now you're the one matching it line by line against a single bank credit. A remittance advice is a short note that says here is the payment and here is exactly what it covers; sending one is easy, and reconciling one at volume is not.
Came here to send a remittance after paying a bill? The next three sections do exactly that, and the Xero steps are short, a two-minute job once you know where they live. The part that actually 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, not 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. That's 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's exactly the data the person on the receiving end has to reconcile.
Sending one remittance advice for a batch payment
Most teams don't 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 don't expect, so it's worth walking through in two halves: pay the batch, then send 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, yet it can cover dozens of invoices. That asymmetry is harmless on the way out. On the way in it's the entire problem, because now 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 is not 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 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'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. Xero is narrower than that, so here's what you can actually change.
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 exactly right, because the document's job is to be unambiguous rather than branded. And if a supplier insists on their own format, you'll usually end up filling in their portal by hand, 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.
The other side of the desk: when a remittance lands in your AR inbox
Everything above is the easy half. Now swap sides. You're no longer paying a supplier; you're 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 doesn't live in the payment screen.
Receiving a remittance is a matching job, not a sending job. The note tells you the customer paid, say, $58,240. It doesn't 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 looks like a document problem and behaves like a reconciliation one, wearing the document's clothing the whole time.
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. Volume and length are what break it. Consider a food wholesaler that supplies 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. 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 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.
Automation earns its place on this half. It pulls every invoice line off the incoming advice, matches each against your open AR in Xero, deals with the short-payments and offsets, and puts the allocations in front of you to approve before posting, so a 12-page advice collapses into a quick check. That's the job RemitClear's Xero remittance matching is built for. To be clear, that's 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.
One more use for that template, and it's the receiving side's favourite. 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 shortens your fortnight.
Summary
The one line to leave with: in Xero, sending a remittance is a record-keeping task and receiving one is a reconciliation task, and only the first is easy. 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. The moment a customer's advice lands in your own inbox, though, you're back to splitting one credit across a long list by hand, and that is the half that repays automating.