Customer payments fell this quarter: which customers changed?
When collections fall, the first question is where. Ask Alex splits the change across customers using the same payment records for both periods.
By Manny Sidhu · Practical guide · Published · Updated
What collections means here
Ask Alex measures collections as net recorded invoice collections in Xero: invoice payments minus customer refunds, grouped by payment date.
Prepayments, overpayments, and receive-money transactions are not included, so this is not every dollar that reached the bank, and it is not a bank balance.
Two periods of the same length
Ask Alex compares your chosen dates with the period of the same length immediately before them. The answer shows net collections for each period, the change in dollars, and the change as a percentage.
If net collections in the earlier period were zero or negative, the percentage is withheld and the answer says why.
An illustrative example
Illustrative example, not customer data: net collections were A$420,000 this quarter and A$480,000 last quarter, a fall of A$60,000, or 12.5%. One customer paid A$70,000 less, another paid A$15,000 more, and the remaining A$5,000 fall was spread across other accounts.
Customer by customer
Each customer's contribution to the change uses the same subtraction as the total, so the contributions add up to the change. Payments that cannot be tied to a customer are kept as their own line instead of being dropped, and the answer says so.
AirCEO ties a payment to a customer through the invoice or credit note it was recorded against.
What the comparison cannot tell you
The contributions show where the change happened. They do not show why a customer paid more or less, and Ask Alex does not guess.
Both periods must be in one currency. Days outside the Xero history AirCEO has synced are not counted as zero, and if the last day of your range was only partly synced, the answer says so.
What each answer shows
Every Ask Alex answer lists its source, scope, time, assumptions, and calculation, along with the Xero payments and refunds behind each figure. The totals and contributions are calculated by code from those records.