The suppliers bills due alert allows you to track bills already overdue and those becoming due.  This gives you an opportunity to make sure clients are on top of their accounts payable before it becomes a problem and help them keep control of their business.  Not paying suppliers on time could be reflective of other issues in the business such as poor cashflow, poor credit control, poor record keeping or simply poor internal payables controls.

What does this tell us?

The total of the bills that have triggered is £1,683 with 100% being overdue i.e. all supplier bills included in the alert are overdue.  In the alert description below it states invoices overdue or due within the next 3 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 3 days this alert must have been flagged the last few days as a minimum.

The oldest overdue invoice is dated May 2021 so has been a problem for a number of months.  As the clients name does not have a star after it the practice is not responsible for the bookkeeping.  That being said it doesn’t mean we should not be flagging this type of issue up to the business owner.  There is a problem that requires resolving.

From the alert description we can see that we have sufficient funds to pay the supplier bills and we are normally on top of this as we typically pay suppliers within 0 days.  Why not these ones?

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 supplier bills.   If we are not paying suppliers on time it has a knock on effect across the whole supply chain that everyone can do without especially SMEs.  If you do not pay your suppliers on time it could leave you with the goods and services you need to provide your solution to customers.  Poor internal controls can lead to overpayments as well as underpayments and this has a negative impact on business cashflow if left undetected.  

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 poor with paying suppliers on time perhaps we should be looking to offer a month end supplier payment run service for them especially if they have the funds to be paying suppliers.  They might just be time poor.

In the example below we are being notified 7 days before a supplier bill is due perhaps this needs to be longer to give the client adequate notice.

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 bills with Xero hotlinks to the individual items and also to the aged payables 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 bill, such as a bank rec has been completed, or a payment has been sent 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.