The situation
A 12-person consulting firm in Newcastle was holding a weekly Monday cashflow meeting. Two directors would log in to Xero, review the dashboard together, and update a shared spreadsheet with the current position. The process took 90 minutes every single week, not because it was complex, but because nobody had a reliable way to see the numbers any other time.
Between Mondays, cashflow was invisible. Invoices went overdue without anyone noticing. Clients who owed significant amounts drifted past the 30-day mark, then the 60-day mark, without triggering any action. The directors knew this was happening but had no simple mechanism to surface it without calling yet another meeting.
The flow we built
A scheduled job runs at 6am every weekday and pulls the firm's invoice and payment data from Xero via the API. The data lands in a Google Sheet that calculates the current 30, 60, and 90-day receivables positions and a 14-day cashflow forecast. At 8am, a Slack message posts in the leadership channel with the headline numbers in plain text.
Any invoice overdue by more than 30 days and above $5,000 triggers an exception line in the same message, naming the client and the amount. No spreadsheet to open, no meeting to join: the information is simply there at the start of each working day.
The platforms
Xero supplies the invoice and payment data via its API. Make.com handles the scheduled pull and the routing logic. Google Sheets holds the aggregation model and the exception thresholds, which the directors can adjust without touching any code. Slack delivers the daily summary. The whole thing runs on a Bot Care Professional tier, so any change to the Xero API or authentication requirements gets caught and resolved before the next 8am post.
The results
The Monday cashflow meeting was decommissioned in its second week. Neither director missed it. Within the first month the daily exception alerts surfaced three large invoices that had been sitting overdue without any action: a combined balance of $38,000 that the firm's credit control process had simply not captured.
The unlocking factor was frequency, not sophistication. The analysis was not more detailed than what the directors were doing in the meeting. The difference was that it happened every day instead of once a week, and it arrived in the tool they were already using rather than requiring a separate login.
What this could look like for your professional services firm
If your cashflow visibility depends on a weekly meeting or someone remembering to check the accounts software, this kind of snapshot pays for itself the first time it catches an overdue invoice. We can configure it for Xero, MYOB, or QuickBooks, and deliver to Slack, Teams, or email depending on how your team works.