A large customer pays you once a month. The transfer that lands in the bank covers 30, 60 or 100 of your invoices, and the only explanation of which ones is the remittance advice they send alongside it: a PDF, a spreadsheet, or sometimes just the text of an email. Xero shows you one bank line. Your receivables show 100 open invoices. Somebody has to connect them.
This guide is for whoever that somebody is: the bookkeeper or finance person at a supplier, wholesaler, contractor or service business whose customers pay in bulk. It covers what a properly recorded bulk payment looks like in Xero, what Xero can do with a remittance advice and where it stops, and how EntryRocket turns the remittance into the finished batch deposit.
What the result should look like in Xero
One customer payment should become one batch deposit in Xero. Its total equals the bank line to the cent. Every invoice the remittance settled in full shows as Paid. Any invoice the customer short paid stays in Awaiting Payment for the balance. When the bank feed brings the transfer through, Xero offers the batch deposit as the match and reconciling it is one click.
That is the standard to hold everything else against. The shortcuts people take when the run is long, a receive money entry against a clearing account, or a lump sum applied to the oldest invoices until the money runs out, all leave the receivables ledger wrong in ways that surface later as statements customers dispute and debtors reports nobody trusts.
What Xero can do with a remittance advice
Xero has no screen that takes a remittance advice as input. What it has are three ways of applying one payment to several invoices, and each one is fine at a certain size.
Find and Match. In the bank reconciliation screen, click Find and Match against the bank line and tick the invoices until they add up. Good for a payment covering a handful of invoices. Slow past ten, and you are reading the remittance off one screen while ticking boxes on another.
Batch deposit. Open the Awaiting Payment list, select the invoices on the remittance, and choose Deposit. Xero records one payment against all of them and it matches the bank line as a unit. This is the right object, and it is what the rest of this guide is about. It has one hard limit: select more than 50 invoices and Xero refuses with this message and creates nothing.
Too many invoices to pay. You cannot create a deposit for more than 50 invoices.
Import the payments. This is the option people go looking for and it does not exist. Xero imports invoices, bills, contacts and bank statements from CSV, but not received payments. The request has been on Xero's product ideas forum for years; on 26 June 2026 Xero's community manager replied that "we don't currently have plans to support importing received payments."
So for a customer who pays 100 invoices at a time, Xero's built-in path is two batch deposits of 50 built by hand, or Find and Match a hundred times. Either way, someone reads every line of the remittance and finds every invoice.
Why the remittance is harder than it looks
The customer's remittance is written from their side of the transaction, not yours. The reference on each line is usually their purchase order number or their internal document number; your invoice number may be a column, a suffix, or absent. Amounts do not always equal your invoice totals: a settlement discount is taken, a disputed line is short paid, a credit note you issued last month is deducted, and sometimes a fee is netted off before the transfer. And the layout is fixed by the customer's ERP, so it never changes to suit you, but it does change without warning when they upgrade.
None of this is hard for a person the first time. It is hard the fortieth time, on the last day of the month, when the remittance is 180 lines long.
How EntryRocket turns the remittance into the batch deposit
You forward the remittance advice to a dedicated EntryRocket address, exactly as the customer sent it. A reader built for that customer's layout knows which column holds your invoice number (or how to derive it from their reference), reads the paid amount on each line, and creates the batch deposit in your Xero organisation against the right bank account. An import report comes back by email listing every invoice paid and anything that could not be matched.
The batch deposit reflects what the remittance says was paid. A short paid invoice is paid at the short amount and keeps its balance in Xero, so the deposit equals the transfer and the ledger shows exactly what is still owed. A batch deposit can only pay invoices, so a settlement discount or fee the customer nets off is not a line in it; the invoice keeps a balance for that amount, which you clear the way you would by hand, usually with a credit note. Nothing is guessed: if a line references an invoice that is not in Xero, the report says so rather than paying something else.
Because the batch deposit is created through the Xero API rather than the Xero screen, the 50-invoice limit does not apply. In a July 2026 test against a live Xero organisation, a 60-invoice remittance produced one batch deposit of $13,216.20 with all 60 payment lines and no errors. The ceiling is 200 invoices in one batch deposit, and that one is Xero's: it rejects a larger batch as a whole, nothing partial is written and no credits are charged, but the run would then need splitting by hand. Well under that, a single monthly run from a large customer is exactly the shape this handles.
Some remittances are not files at all. Payment platforms and some ERPs send the remittance as the body of an email, with the invoice table in the message text. Readers set up for that read the email body directly: forward the email inline and it is processed like any attachment. Forwarding it as an attached .eml file does not work, so forward the message itself.
One reader per customer layout
A reader is built for one remittance layout, from sample files you send us. If you have three customers who pay in bulk and each sends a different remittance format, that is three readers, all creating batch deposits in the same Xero organisation. When a customer changes their layout, send us the new file and we update the reader.
The same mechanism handles remittances from payment processors and, for NDIS providers, plan manager payment runs, which have their own guide: reconcile NDIS plan manager remittances in Xero. For the Xero object itself and the batch payment side (paying many bills in one transfer), see import batch deposits into Xero.
Getting started
Send us one remittance advice, exactly as it arrived from the customer, and tell us which Xero organisation it belongs to. We reply with what the batch deposit would look like in your Xero from that file, with every invoice matched, before anything is set up or paid for. If a line will not match, you will see that too. Then we build the reader, you test it against your own Xero with real remittances, and from then on the process is a forwarding rule.