Xero holds your invoice, shows a pay-now option on it, records the payment and reconciles it. Xero doesn't take money out of your customer's bank account, and its own reminder feature stops at five emails on one schedule for your whole organisation. So the apps worth adding do one of two jobs: they collect the money, or they chase it. Very few do both.
In this article
The short version
- Xero's own UK page lists your customer's options as "debit card, credit card, direct debit (via Go Cardless or Stripe), Google Pay or Apple Pay", so somebody else collects.
- Xero ships three invoice reminders, caps you at five, and applies them across your whole organisation.
- In Xero's own API specification, invoice reminders are a single read-only boolean, so no app can read your reminder schedule or change it (Xero OpenAPI specification 17.0.0).
- The Bank Feeds API is closed to all but financial institutions, bank rules have no API at all, and the only change an app can make to a payment in your ledger is to delete it.
- Xero's UK Payments category holds around 48 apps and fewer than ten collect from a customer by UK direct debit.
- Adfin is available as a payment method inside Xero, the same slot Stripe and GoCardless occupy.
What Xero already does, with no app at all
Plenty of apps in this category are sold against a version of Xero weaker than the one you're running, so start with what you've already paid for.
On chasing, Xero sends automated email reminders. You get three by default and you can have five, with presets at 7 days, 14 days and 21 days, each set as a number of days the invoice is "due in" or "overdue by". Xero sends them daily between 4am and 8am in your organisation's time zone, and a day's reminders missed because the feature was switched off don't catch up later. You can turn them off for the organisation, for one customer, or for particular invoices, and customer replies land in the login email of whoever first turned reminders on.
On the bank side you get feeds from "over 21,000 financial institutions" (a global figure, not a UK one), manual statement upload, bank rules that treat groups of similar transactions the same way every time, cash coding for reconciling many statement lines at once, and JAX. Xero's wording on JAX carries its own limit: it "automatically reconciles transactions when it's highly confident they match", using rules, matches, memory, and a prediction step that "suggests based on how other Xero users reconciled similar transactions". You can turn JAX on or off per bank account.
On reporting, you have the Aged Receivables Summary and, on each contact's Activity tab, an average days to payment figure with the invoice history behind it. Where most of your customers pay near terms, that's enough, and Xero charges you nothing extra for it.
Two limits to pin down before you go shopping. Xero's reminders are email only, on one schedule that every customer shares. And the stop-on-payment behaviour depends on your bank feed, because Xero's own guide says you'll need to connect your bank account "so it stops sending reminders when payment arrives". An unreconciled payment can still get chased.
What Xero leaves to somebody else
Xero's UK campaign page for online invoice payments lists what your customer can pay with, and the parenthesis does the work: "debit card, credit card, direct debit (via Go Cardless or Stripe), Google Pay or Apple Pay". Five words, and they tell you that direct debit in Xero happens through a provider. Xero renders the vendor name as two words on its own page, so that's how it appears here.
Xero's dedicated GoCardless page splits the labour. GoCardless "collect[s] payments directly from your customer's bank account", and "Xero will record the GoCardless fee as an expense and reconcile the payment automatically". Collection on one side, bookkeeping on the other, in Xero's own sentences.
The most direct statement Xero publishes about not moving money isn't on a payments page at all. From its bank connections page: "Xero can't make payments or move money through bank feeds." Read that as scoped to feeds, because Xero does publish an outbound payments product.
The same pattern shows up in Xero's own outbound product. Xero Bill Payments is published by Xero itself on the Xero App Store and it pays your suppliers by open banking, and the listing names the provider behind it: Crezco, "a payment institution that is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to provide open banking payment services in the UK". So even where Xero puts its own name on a payments product, the regulated institution is somebody else. Xero publishes no Xero-branded product that collects money in. The listing carries 4.69 out of 5 from 16 reviews.
That leaves the question a Xero user turns up with: can you collect direct debit in Xero at all? Does Xero collect direct debit? takes it on its own. Once a provider is in place your bookkeeping changes shape too, since the integration creates clearing accounts in your books that weren't there before, and how to collect payments in Xero by direct debit works through them.
Reminders: one read-only switch
Xero's published API specification exposes invoice reminders at one endpoint, /InvoiceReminders/Settings, and that endpoint supports GET only. The object it returns has exactly one property: a boolean called Enabled, described in Xero's spec as a "setting for on or off". That's the whole programmatic surface, from Xero's official OpenAPI specification, version 17.0.0, at the commit dated 12 August 2026.
Work through what an app connected to your Xero can therefore discover. It can find out whether your reminders are switched on. It cannot see how many you've configured, at what offsets, with what wording, to which addresses, or whether any have been sent. It can't switch them on or off, and it can't add, edit or delete one.
So when you install a chasing app on top of Xero's own reminders, the two are blind to each other. Your app can't know that Xero emailed the same customer at 5am about the same invoice, and Xero can't know your app sent a WhatsApp message at nine. The App Store listing won't tell you this, because it isn't a fact about any particular app: it's a fact about the surface every app has to work with.
What you can do about it is pick one chasing system and turn the other off yourself. Xero lets you switch reminders off for the organisation, for a customer, or invoice by invoice, and the control has to be on your side, because your app has no way of reaching it.
One caution, because the point gets overstated: this describes what Xero's API publishes, and it isn't evidence that any named app double-chases anybody. Whether a particular tool duplicates Xero's emails depends on how its vendor tells you to configure it.
The limits every Xero app works inside
The rest of Xero's contract with app developers is public in the same specification, and it explains a good deal of behaviour you'd otherwise put down to a vendor cutting corners. Everything in this table is from Xero's OpenAPI specification 17.0.0, at the commit dated 12 August 2026.
| Surface | What Xero's specification publishes | What it means for an app you install |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice reminders | GET only, one boolean field | No app can read or change your reminder schedule |
| Bank feeds | "a closed API that is only available to financial institutions that have an established financial services partnership with Xero" | Unless your app's publisher is a bank, it can't supply your feed |
| Bank rules | No endpoint at all, on an exhaustive search of the specification | No app can read, create or audit the rules already coding your transactions |
| Payments | Payment.Status permits AUTHORISED or DELETED, and the worked update example is a delete |
A mis-posted payment gets deleted and re-created, never edited, and the deletion shows in your history |
| Batch payments | "It is not possible to delete batch payments via the API" | A batch posted wrongly can't be removed by the app that posted it |
| Payment services | GET and PUT only, no update and no delete | An app can add a pay-now service and can't remove it again |
| Payment service type | "This will always be CUSTOM for payment services created via the API" | Anything beyond a custom pay-now link isn't something a developer can self-serve |
| Prepayments and overpayments | Read-only, though allocations can be created | An app can allocate a credit it finds and can't create the credit |
| Invoice email | POST sends "a copy of a specific invoice to related contact via email", with no custom subject, body or recipient | An app can trigger Xero's own invoice email and can't send a bespoke chase through Xero |
| UK batch narrative | Narrative, "(UK Only) Only shows on the statement line in Xero. Max length =18" |
Eighteen characters is the whole of what a UK batch payment says on your statement line |
Two of those rows work together and bound every reconciliation tool on the store. No app that isn't a financial institution can supply your bank feed, and no app of any kind can see your bank rules, so every third-party matching tool works on transactions that arrived through a channel it doesn't control, without sight of the rules that may already have coded them.
The delete-only rule on payments is the one most likely to come up in practice. If a provider posts a collection against the wrong invoice, correcting it means a deletion and a new payment, and your audit trail shows both.
Collecting money against chasing it
Xero's Payments category describes itself like this: "Make it easier for customers to pay you with the right payment app." Open it and you'll find around 48 apps across two pages. We read every listing and counted fewer than ten that collect from a customer by UK direct debit.
Most of what's there points the other way: supplier payments, payroll runs, company cards, expense management, foreign exchange, point of sale and a run of vertical products for schools, sports clubs or building projects. A category called Payments is mostly about paying.
The grouping below is our reading of what each listing claims, taken from the listing text, and it isn't a test of the products.
| Group | What the listing says it does | Examples, from Xero's UK listings |
|---|---|---|
| Collects by UK direct debit | Debits your customer's bank account against an invoice | Adfin, GoCardless, Access Pay Suite (by EazyCollect), FastPay, uCollect, ezyCollect, Apxium |
| Collects, but not by direct debit | Cards, wallets or a checkout, with no UK mandate described | Stripe, PayPal, Square, SumUp, Mollie, Windcave, Lopay, Chargebee |
| Chases only | Reminders, statements, interest or matching, with no collection | Chaser, Satago, Paidnice, Trove, Kolleno, Statey, Nagging Panda, EasyInterest, RemitClear, AR Collect |
| Escalates and recovers | Pursues the debt itself, or hands it to somebody who will | Garfield, GetPaid, AutoSettle, CreditorWatch Collect |
| Not customer collection at all | Paying out, spending, POS or vertical software | Wise Business, Crezco, Pleo, Soldo, Telleroo, Expensify, Apron |
Our classification, built on Xero's own UK listing text.
A chasing tool improves the odds that your customer takes an action, and a collecting tool removes the need for one. On a book of recurring monthly fees those aren't close substitutes, because a reminder needs somebody at the other end to log in and pay, while a live mandate takes the money on the due date whether or not your customer thought about it. They're priced on different logic too, since chasing is mostly a monthly subscription and collection is charged per transaction. Best Xero apps for getting paid in 2026 runs the roster with every score and its review count.
How to judge a payment or credit control app for Xero
Nine questions, in the order that saves you the most time.
- Does it collect money, or only ask for it? Look for a verb like debit, collect or charge, and be wary of "payment solution" with no method named.
- If it collects by direct debit, which scheme and which country? Several listings say "direct debit" and mean ACH or SEPA, and Xero's own GoCardless page says "direct debit, ACH and PAD" without naming one.
- Who holds the mandate, and what happens if you leave? Moving mandates between providers runs through the Bacs Direct Debit Bulk Change Process where enough of them are moving, and below your provider's threshold your customers sign again. No Bacs document publishes that threshold.
- Does it post payments against the invoice, or into a clearing account? A clearing account is a sound design and it relocates the reconciliation instead of removing it.
- Will it fight your Xero reminders? Given the single read-only boolean above, assume it can't see them and decide which system owns chasing.
- What does the listing publish about price? Often nothing: the listings for Access Pay Suite, for FastPay and for uCollect state no fees at all.
- How thin is the review base? A five-star average on one review tells you almost nothing, and one app here carries a single review dated February 2022.
- Does it need something Xero won't give it? A tool promising to manage your bank rules or supply a feed is promising a surface Xero's API doesn't expose.
- Does it work with the rest of your stack? UK practice management is a gap: Karbon publishes around 70 integrations and not one collects client fees. Which practice tools does Adfin integrate with? sets out what does connect.
Which accounting software works best for getting paid? takes the same questions across ledgers, and collecting payments in Sage: what your options are and how to collect payments in QuickBooks by direct debit cover the two you'd compare Xero against.
Where Adfin fits
Adfin is available as a payment method inside Xero, the same slot Stripe and GoCardless occupy, and it appears on the Xero App Store under both Payments and Debtor management. You add it as an online payment option when you create an invoice, and a payment link goes on the invoice, including the PDF. The integration syncs both ways: approved invoices come in, collection happens on Adfin, and payments post back against the invoice they belong to, with auto-matching for underpayments, overpayments and payments arriving with no reference.
On chasing, Adfin runs email, WhatsApp or SMS from your own domain, with instalment plans, statutory late fees and a card fallback when a direct debit fails. Read that against relying on Xero's built-in reminders: five email slots on one organisation-wide schedule, against per-customer sequences on three channels with the collection attached. Of active paying businesses on Adfin, 72.3% are connected to Xero (Adfin platform data).
Adfin's App Store listing describes it as "Cards, bank transfers and direct debit all in one place, with an AI credit controller to automate receivables", and prices it at "20p + 1.0% per successful collection, capped at £4 for direct debits and bank payments. No monthly fees or minimums." The listing shows 5 out of 5 from 6 reviews, and six reviews is a thin base that shouldn't be read beside Chaser's 374 as though the numbers mean the same thing. Neither Adfin's page nor Xero's states a VAT position on the fee.
If your fees are agreed at proposal stage, how to get a direct debit mandate signed at proposal signature gets the mandate into the same client interaction as the price.
What Xero doesn't publish
We checked four gaps here, and each one changes how much weight you can put on something you'll read elsewhere.
There's no published definition of a Xero payment partner. Nine Xero URLs and four site-restricted searches across xero.com, apps.xero.com, developer.xero.com and productideas.xero.com returned no page defining the phrase "approved Xero payment partner", setting out criteria for it, or listing who holds it, and no App Store listing we read carries a badge for it. Anyone showing you a definitive partner list has inferred it, and which payment providers are approved Xero payment partners? sets out what can be established.
Xero's app review and certification process isn't readable. The three developer pages covering app partner guides, the FAQs page and certification checkpoints returned metadata only, so we can't tell you what Xero checks before listing an app.
Xero's own store contradicts itself on review scores. The Payments category gave Stripe 2.52 out of 5 from 371 reviews, and the accounts receivable collection gave 2.53 from 369, the same day. GoCardless read the same on both. The gap is small, but it does mean a score with no count, date or page behind it can't be reproduced, even from Xero's own pages.
Xero also publishes two different shapes for what direct debit costs. Its small-business guide gives a fixed fee of £0.20 to £2.00 per transaction, while its accountant-facing gateway guide prices GoCardless direct debit at "1% + 20p per transaction, capped at £4". Both are Xero UK pages, and one is a flat fee where the other is a percentage capped at double the guide's ceiling. For a provider's real price, use the provider's own page.
None of the Xero pages behind this article carries an effective date or a last-updated line either, so every figure here is a snapshot and not a standing fact.
Want your chasing and your collection on the same ledger entry? Book a demo or see Adfin pricing.
Common questions
Does Xero collect payments itself? No. Xero's UK page lists the methods your customer can use as "debit card, credit card, direct debit (via Go Cardless or Stripe), Google Pay or Apple Pay", and its GoCardless page says GoCardless "collect[s] payments directly from your customer's bank account" while Xero records the fee and reconciles. Xero's own bank connections page adds that "Xero can't make payments or move money through bank feeds."
Are Xero's built-in invoice reminders enough? For a book where most customers pay near terms, often yes. You get three reminders by default and up to five, at presets of 7 days, 14 days and 21 days, on email only, with one schedule for your whole organisation. What you'd be buying is longer sequences, other channels, per-customer timing and the collection itself.
Can a chasing app see the reminders Xero is already sending?
No. Xero's API exposes invoice reminders as a single read-only boolean called Enabled, so an app can discover whether reminders are on and nothing else. It can't read your schedule, your wording or your send history, and it can't switch them off. Pick one system to own chasing and turn the other off yourself, on Xero's OpenAPI specification 17.0.0.
How many Xero apps actually collect by UK direct debit? Fewer than ten of the roughly 48 apps in Xero's UK Payments category, on our reading of every listing. The ones describing UK direct debit collection are Adfin, GoCardless, Access Pay Suite (by EazyCollect), FastPay, uCollect, ezyCollect (by Sidetrade) and Apxium. Most of the category is about paying suppliers, payroll or company cards.
What happens if an app posts the wrong payment into my Xero? It gets deleted and re-created. Xero's specification permits only two states on a payment: AUTHORISED and DELETED, so an app can't correct an amount, a date or the invoice a payment was allocated to. Batch payments can't be deleted through the API at all, on Xero's OpenAPI specification 17.0.0.
Is there an official list of approved Xero payment partners? None that we could find. Nine Xero URLs and four site-restricted searches returned no definition of the phrase, no criteria and no list, and no listing carries a badge for it. Xero's specification does say a payment service created through the API "will always be CUSTOM", so a second, non-programmatic route exists, and Xero publishes nothing about what it requires.
Sources
- Xero — accept payments online (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero — bank connections (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero — bank reconciliation (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero — collect payments with GoCardless and Xero (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero — a guide to online payment gateways for your clients (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero — online payment services, a guide for UK small businesses (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero Central — set up invoice reminders (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero Central — how invoice reminders work (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero — official OpenAPI specification, version 17.0.0 (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero App Store — Payments category (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero App Store — accounts receivable software collection (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero App Store — Adfin listing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Xero App Store — Xero Bill Payments listing (accurate as of August 2026)
- Karbon — integrations directory (accurate as of August 2026)
This article is information rather than advice. All Xero facts are quoted from Xero's own pages, from Xero Central and from Xero's official OpenAPI specification version 17.0.0 at the commit dated 12 August 2026. No page carries an effective date, App Store scores move, and the collect-against-chase grouping is our reading of listing text rather than a product test, so check anything you rely on. Adfin publishes this article and appears in the same App Store categories as the apps named in it. Last updated August 2026.
