A repeating invoice (also called a recurring invoice in Xero) is a scheduled record that generates, and optionally emails, a fresh document on a cycle you set. Used properly, recurring invoice automation removes a chunk of admin from any business sending the same charges to the same customers on a regular basis – retainers, subscriptions, rent, support contracts, monthly bookkeeping fees, you name it. This is the practical guide we wish more users had read before setting them up wrong – and a far better option than creating invoices manually each month.

What is a repeating invoice in Xero?

A repeating invoice is a saved invoice template tied to a schedule. You set the customer, the line items, the frequency and the start and end dates. Xero then creates the next recurring invoice in the series automatically, either as a draft for you to approve, or as an approved (and optionally emailed) document without you touching it.

Behind the scenes it lives at Business > Invoices > Repeating. Each one is its own master record, separate from the actual documents it spits out. Editing it only affects future runs, not items already generated – that catches people out more than anything else.

How do repeating invoices work in Xero?

Each invoice is generated early on the morning of the scheduled date, in the organisation’s time zone. If you’ve chosen “Approve” or “Approve and email”, the invoice is created already approved, posts to your accounts, and sits in Awaiting Payment. If you’ve chosen “Save as Draft”, the system will save your invoice as a draft instead – it lands in Draft for you to review and approve manually. Using Xero this way still works, but the workflow adds a manual step compared with the fully automated approve-and-email setting.

Once generated, each one is a normal sales document in your accounts. It can be edited, voided, paid off, attached to a bill, the lot. The repeating record carries on until the end date, or forever if you didn’t set one. The Repeating Invoices API also exposes the same records to integrators, so any external tool can read or update them.

Setting up your first repeating invoice

Go to Business > Invoices, click the dropdown next to New Invoice, and pick New Repeating Invoice. The new repeating invoice page asks for:

  1. Repeat this transaction every – pick the cycle (more on cycles below). This is one of the recurring transactions Xero schedules in advance for you.
  2. Invoice date – the date stamped on each run. Use placeholders like [Week], [Month] or [Year] in line descriptions if you want the period to show up on the document.
  3. Due date – usually a number of days after the invoice date, e.g. “of the following month” for 30-day terms.
  4. End date – leave the end date blank for an open-ended series, or set a hard stop for a fixed-term contract.
  5. Approval setting – choose “Save as Draft” to keep the invoice as a draft for review-first workflows, “Approve” if you trust the setup, or select “Approve for sending” to push the version approved for sending straight out to the customer automatically.
  6. Reference – you can set a reference at the master record level, so every run carries the same reference (or use the placeholder to vary it).
  7. Line items, branding and contact – same as a normal entry. The branding theme and payment services attached here will follow every run.

Save it, and the first invoice will appear on the start date you’ve set, ready to send (or be sent for you).

Schedule cycles: weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, annual

In the platform you get daily, weekly, monthly and yearly intervals, measured in weeks or months, and you can multiply them. You set the day of issue and the system handles the rest. So:

  • Weekly retainers – “every 1 week” on a Monday for a fixed-fee marketing or consultancy retainer. Recurring daily or weekly invoices are hugely helpful for service businesses with high volume.
  • Fortnightly – “every 2 weeks”, common for cleaning rounds and certain trades. Weekly invoices or for communicating a relevant billing period on a monthly invoice (or fortnightly here), this is the right setting – helps customers reconcile their own books too.
  • Monthly – “every 1 month” on day 1, the bread and butter of subscription invoicing and SaaS. Use a clear period on a monthly invoice and the relevant service dates (e.g. “Services – June 2026”) so customers know what they’re paying for.
  • Quarterly – “every 3 months”, typical for VAT-quarter aligned services or mid-market software contracts.
  • Annual – “every 1 year”, for licences, memberships and annual maintenance fees.

The “every X months” pattern is also how you set up a 6-monthly cycle. There isn’t a “biannual” option as such – just say every 6 months. Using the repeating feature, you raise invoices on a regular cadence without ever opening the new-invoice screen.

Two settings turn a repeating invoice from a saved record into something that actually runs your invoicing for you:

  • Approve and email – it’s generated, approved and sent to the customer using your default email setup, all on the schedule date. This is what most people mean when they say they want to automate the whole thing – no manual intervention before approval, no chasing.
  • Online payment link – if you’ve connected a payment service (Stripe, GoCardless, PayPal), the “Pay now” button shows up in the email and on the online document. Customers can pay invoices straight from the email rather than waiting for a manual reminder. For direct debit collection, GoCardless integrated with Xero is the closest thing to fully hands-off subscription invoicing.
  • Default message – personalise the default message on the email so each customer gets a friendly, on-brand line rather than a stock notice.
  • Save-as-draft option – if you’d rather review every invoice before it goes out, the repeating option saves a draft on schedule and you send the invoice yourself. More control, more clicks – currently more work is required from you, but sensible when amounts vary or when service dates need confirming.

Pair “Approve and email” with a GoCardless mandate, and a £200 monthly retainer can run for 12 months without you touching it once. Set it to issue at the end of each month and you’ve automated the most repetitive part of accounting software admin.

Turn an existing invoice into a repeating record

If you’ve already raised a one-off and want it to repeat from now on, it’s even easier than starting fresh. Open the original, click Options > Copy to Repeating, set the schedule, and select “Approve for sending” or “Save as Draft” depending on how hands-off you want it. The platform just copies the description into a new master record – the original stays untouched in your books. You also have the ability to add line items, attachments or branding before saving.

Retainer billing patterns

A few patterns we see working well in real businesses:

  • Fixed monthly retainer – one repeating invoice per client, monthly on day 1, “Approve and email”, GoCardless mandate. Set and forget.
  • Retainer plus variable hours – one repeating invoice for the fixed element, plus a separate manual invoice each month for any time over the cap. Keeps the retainer auditable.
  • Annual subscription billed monthly – 12 monthly repeating invoices that end after a year, paired with a renewal reminder so you can review pricing before the next cycle starts.

Common pitfalls (and how to avoid them)

The mistakes are nearly always around dates and customer state, not the content itself.

  • Date drift on quarterly cycles – “every 3 months” starting on the 31st will land on the 30th of the next quarter, then the 30th forever. If you need a true quarter-end date, set the start to the 28th, or use placeholder text rather than the date itself for the period reference.
  • End-of-month edge cases – 31 January, 31 March, 31 May etc. work fine, but a series that starts on 31 January will fall back to 28th in non-leap February and stay there. Double-check the schedule preview before saving.
  • Customer payment-method changes – if a customer’s GoCardless mandate fails, the document still generates and emails. Action required – check Awaiting Payment ageing weekly so failed direct debits don’t pile up unnoticed.
  • Price changes mid-series – editing the line item only affects future runs. If you need to retro-correct, you’ll need to credit and reissue the existing document manually. Partial payments already received against earlier runs aren’t affected.
  • Tax rate changes – VAT rate changes (or a customer moving between VAT statuses) need a manual edit of the repeating record. The platform won’t notice for you. You may also need to manually update the date in description text if you’ve referenced a specific period there.
  • Attached files – PDFs and supporting documents attached to the master record are not copied to each run. If a contract reference is required and all repeating invoices need it, embed it in the description or the branding footer rather than the attachments tab.

Reporting on recurring revenue

The Repeating Invoices screen on the repeating tab at Business > Invoices > Repeating shows the value of your active records and their next-issue dates. Sum the monthly equivalents and you’ve got a quick monthly recurring revenue (MRR) view of how many invoices each month, which is gold dust for cashflow forecasting and management accounts. For subscription management at scale this becomes a powerful tool that drives the front end of an MRR dashboard, with one row per subscriber.

For a fuller view, run the Aged Receivables, Sales by Item and the Sales Overview reports filtered by the contacts or items you bill on repeat. Cross-reference these with your other financial reports (P&L by month, deferred revenue) to build a complete recurring-revenue picture. If recurring revenue is core to your model, it’s worth feeding the data into analytics or a forecasting add-on for a proper MRR / churn dashboard.

What the Xero community has asked for

The product ideas forum has plenty of long-running threads on this topic – well worth checking the option to share and support customer ideas for Xero if there’s a feature you’d find useful. Recurring asks the team has logged include: a true daily repeating option that would be hugely helpful for recurring daily invoicing; the ability to update the date in description of every repeated invoice without having to manually update it each time (which would save hours); and a fuller version of the same idea applied to bills – if approval whereas if this could be automated bills could be automatically approved and sent on a set day, that would be really helpful and mirroring how recurring invoices already work. Some users have flagged that all repeating invoices need manual intervention before approval whereas, even though selecting “Approve for sending” already covers most of that gap, the community would like more granular controls. The platform team reads the forum, so this option to share and support customer ideas is genuinely the fastest route to influencing the roadmap. If you’ve used a tool like Xero before but found this gap, the forum is where to flag it.

How do I stop repeating invoices in Xero?

Open the repeating invoice from Business > Invoices > Repeating, and either set an end date in the past (which stops it without deleting the history), or click Options > Delete. Deleting only removes the master record, not any documents it has already generated. If you just want to pause it, edit the next-issue date forward by a few months and come back to it later.

Need a hand getting it right?

We set repeating invoices up for clients all the time as part of our cloud bookkeeping work. If you’re invoicing more than a handful of customers on a cycle, getting the records, payment links and approval rules right will save you hours every month. Get in touch and we’ll help you map your invoice cycles into the platform properly.