The sales invoices due alert allows you to track invoices already overdue and those becoming due.  This gives you an opportunity to make sure clients are on top of their accounts receivable before it becomes a problem and help them keep control of their business.

What does this tell us?

The total of the invoices that have triggered is £1,048 with 100% being overdue i.e. all sales invoices included in the alert are overdue.  In the alert description below it states invoices overdue or due within the next 14 days so that must be the parameter set for this particular client.  Only invoices in line with the parameters set will be included in these totals so it may differ from your total aged receivables balance.

As all invoices are overdue and we have set the threshold at 14 days this alert must have been flagged for at least 2 weeks.

The oldest overdue invoice is a couple of weeks ago so the age of the invoices is not a huge concern but the fact that the whole of the ledger is could indicate poor internal controls such as no formal credit control process.  As the clients name has a star after it the practice is responsible for the bookkeeping (hopefully not the credit control as well).

If you hover over the chart it will show you the value of the invoices and due date.  In our example below the whole chart is pink as they are all overdue.  If we had any upcoming due invoices these would be shown in blue.

Why should we care?

In order to maintain good cash flow and relationships you need to keep on top of customer receipts.   Are customers paying you and then what action to take if they are not (this can be coupled with the invoice reminders and bank balances to show a couple of other issues)?  What process is in place to capture this early before it does long term damage to the clients business and customer relationships.  Once this has been passed to a debt collection agent that could be the end of the working relationship. 

Late payments cost UK SMEs £51.5 billion in 2019 according to research from Hitachi Capital.  Approximately 27% of sales invoice are paid late.  Imagine the positive impact you can have on clients businesses helping them in this area.

Clicking on the cog icon will allow you to amend the alert settings for this client.  If we know this client is particularly bad with credit control but they have a healthy bank account then we decide to reduce the number of days before we want to be alerted for example changing the variable to 0 will mean we only know about invoices being overdue.

In the example below you can see that we had previously snoozed this alert.  This may indicate we have spoken to the client previously about the issue and we snoozed it to allow for some action to be taken.  Perhaps the client was on holiday or busy for a couple of weeks and we did not want to take further action until they were ready.

We can also turn off the alert should it no longer be relevant for a client.

Workflow is massively important for any business so to make things as streamlined as possible for you we have added a list of the offending invoices with Xero hotlinks to the individual items and also to the aged receivables report should you wish to have a deeper look at the client.

You do not need to be logged into the client.  The link will redirect you to the correct client once you have logged in.

If you are happy that an action has been carried out to clear the invoice, such as a bank rec has been completed then you can mark the alert complete to notify Hindsight that it has been dealt with.

Your other option would be to dismiss the alert.  When dismissing an alert in Hindsight please bear in mind that you are informing us not to remind you about this particular transaction again.  You must be absolutely certain that you no longer want to know about that item.