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We use Xero’s Pay bills (UK, direct bank transfer) to schedule GBP supplier payments for future dates. Our internal control needs an approver to receive the bills and supporting documents and authorise each payment before it goes out. We’ve built that workflow on the Xero API and webhooks, and it works well for payments made immediately.

Scheduled payments break it completely. Once a batch is scheduled:

Nothing appears in the Accounting API. Not in Payments, BatchPayments, Bank Transactions or the Invoices endpoint, until the payment date arrives.
The bills themselves aren’t updated. Their status, UpdatedDateUTC and PlannedPaymentDate are all unchanged, so no webhook fires.
The bills are locked once they’re in a batch, so we can’t add a marker ourselves.
No email notification is sent when a batch is scheduled.

The batch is clearly visible in Xero’s own Payment activity screen, with its status, payment date, bill count and total. Xero holds the data; it just isn’t exposed to the apps and integrations that rely on the API. The result is that any approval, notification or cash-flow process built around Xero only learns about a scheduled payment on the day the money leaves, which is too late to be useful.

What we’re asking for:

An API endpoint (or BatchPayments status values) for scheduled Pay-bills batches, showing the bills, amounts, payment date and status (Scheduled, Failed, Sent).
A webhook event when a batch is scheduled, changed, failed or sent.
At minimum, update the bills when they’re added to a scheduled batch, for example by setting PlannedPaymentDate, so integrations can detect them.
An email notification when a batch is scheduled or fails. We currently have a failed batch showing in Payment activity that we’d only find by checking the screen manually.

Scheduling payments is one of the main reasons to use Pay bills, but right now it’s the one part of the payment process that can’t be controlled or audited outside the Xero screen. Is this on the roadmap, and is there any interim way to access scheduled batch data?

surely an easy and inexpensive solution to implement for scheduling remittance advices and payslips close to actual payment dates

Absolutely critical, can't believe it hasn't been implemented.

This is such a fundamental function when often scheduling payments in advance at any time but especially over holiday periods.

Goes along with same request for payslips which is also being ignored

This would be so helpful, surely it isn't hard to implement?!

great to see another reasonable suggestion hit the Xero Ideas Black Hole!

A [payment date] field would be really really helpful

A simple option to schedule remittance advice to be sent on the payment date (or a tick box when scheduling payments) would make this process far more efficient and professional. If Xero can’t support full scheduling, then at minimum the remittance email must include a clear [Payment Date] field (and ideally a send time option). Sending remittance before payment is made creates avoidable confusion for suppliers and adds unnecessary admin for users—this should be standard functionality alongside scheduled payments.

A simple [payment date] field in the remittance email would solve this issue for us!

Very useful it would be, have requested since started using Xero

This or the ability to add a [payment date] field to the remittance template email would be great!

Yes please !! A simple tick box to send Email now or at time of scheduled payment - I too try to preload scheduled payments but when sending remittance early often suppliers think they're getting an early payment and just doesn't look professional.

I feel that this is pretty basic and absolutely required

Yes - agree this is absolutely required.

I travel overseas for work and pleasure and like you schedule paying bills in the future both as I want to manage cashflow, dont want to be paying bills on 'not safe' wifi and don't want to be working whilst on holiday!

Having a delayed remittance function to coincide with the payment would help save time and be beneficial for businesses allocating my payments

Please add the ability to automatically send receipts/remittance advice

This adds so much confusion to our clients

This is a must-have feature

This would be such a practical addition to batch creditor payments. I regularly set up end of month bill payments a week or so ahead. Scheduling the remittance emails at the same time just makes sense.

It would make my life 100 times easier to be able to do this! Dealing with sole trading sub contractors that need to be paid on a Friday, they get very confused if I try to set up a bulk payment in advance and send out the remittance. No one reads the actual payment date.