Xero’s Reminder To AP: Pay Your Bills

Expense management service provider Xero wants corporate suppliers and manufacturers to get paid and to get paid faster. As part of that effort, the company is introducing a way to remind members of the accounts payable department to settle their invoices.

Reports on Tuesday (Sept. 22) said Xero is gearing up to roll out two new features to its small business financial management services. Among them is Invoice Reminders, a tool the firm said “will help small businesses from being a bank.”

The service lets small suppliers send a reminder to their corporate buyers to settle their bills. Xero said the new feature not only aims to help SMEs get paid faster but to take the discomfort out of a typically uncomfortable conversation between buyer and supplier about outstanding invoices.

Invoice Reminders will be rolled out to business users of the Xero platform in addition to another new tool, Billable Expenses.

Billable Expenses will allow small businesses to recover the expenses incurred on behalf of their corporate customers when fulfilling orders and services. Xero will now let business users mark an item as a billable expense and assign it to a contact, automating its presence on future invoices to that client.

Both solutions, Xero said, are part of an effort to assure that small businesses get paid from their corporate customers more quickly. In announcing the new tools, Xero cited recent research that found SMEs using Xero saw an improvement in the time it took them to get paid by 30 days between 2011 and 2014.

“Traditional accounting solutions have failed to give small businesses the capability to automate key tasks,” the company said in its announcement. “Billable Expenses and Invoice Reminders will give customers new ways of ensuring their cash flow is maintained, while getting time back from the drag of administration to get on with running their own business.”

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