Sending invoices to Xero — Help

If you keep your books in Xero, 1pm can send your invoices and their payments straight across, so you raise an invoice once and your accountant sees it without anyone rekeying figures. The sync is one way: 1pm pushes to Xero, Xero never pushes back. Your event, your line items, and your payments stay authoritative in 1pm; Xero gets a faithful copy for the books.

This article covers connecting your Xero organisation, mapping your accounts and tax rates, pushing invoices by hand or automatically, and how payments follow.

Connecting Xero

Go to Account and open the Xero page (there's also a card for it on your Billing hub, and a link in the header of the Invoices list). Click Connect with Xero and you're taken to Xero to sign in and authorise. If you look after more than one organisation in Xero, you'll be asked which one to link. Pick it and you're brought back to 1pm, connected.

You can disconnect at any time from the same page. That stops any further syncing; nothing already in Xero is touched.

Mapping your accounts and tax

Before the first invoice can go across, 1pm needs to know where things belong in your chart of accounts. On the Xero page you'll set:

Sales account: the revenue account every invoice line is posted to (for example "Sales" or "Event income"). All the lines on a 1pm invoice go to this one account.
Payment account: where payments are recorded when they sync. Xero accepts a payment against any account with "Enable payments to this account" ticked, not only bank accounts, so the picker lists your banks first and any clearing or contra accounts under their own group.

If you take card payments, pick a clearing account rather than your real bank account. Card money reaches your bank as a batched, fee-netted Stripe payout, so a discrete 1pm payment posted straight to the bank has nothing to match and the Xero balance drifts above your actual statement. 1pm warns you inline if you pick a bank account while card payments are live. It stays a warning rather than a block, because an account taking bank transfers or cash is right to pick their bank.
Tax rates: each tax rate you use in 1pm is matched to the equivalent Xero tax type (your GST or sales-tax rate). Anything untaxed in 1pm is sent as no tax. A service charge goes across as its own line at your default rate; a gratuity goes across untaxed.

Map these once and they're remembered. If you add a new tax rate in 1pm later, come back and point it at the right Xero tax type.

Draft or Authorised

There's one setting that decides how invoices land in Xero: push status.

Draft (the default) drops each invoice into Xero as a draft for you to review and approve there. Safe and reversible: nothing is posted to your accounts until you approve it in Xero.
Authorised sends invoices straight through as approved and ready.

The choice matters for payments. A payment can only attach to an approved Xero invoice. So if you're on Draft and a payment comes in, 1pm holds that payment until the invoice is approved in Xero, and tells you that's why it's waiting. Approve the invoice in Xero, then re-check it from the sync console (below) and the payment follows.

Pushing invoices

You've two ways to get invoices across.

By hand, from the sync console. Open the Xero console (linked from the Invoices header and the Billing card). It lists your invoices with their sync state. Push one with the button on its row, or use Push all to send everything outstanding in one go. A bulk push paces itself to stay within Xero's rate limits, so a large batch takes a little while; you don't need to babysit it.

Automatically, on send or payment. If you'd rather not think about it, turn on auto-push on the Xero page (it's off by default). With it on, an invoice is queued for Xero the moment you send it to a client or record a payment against it, in the background, off to one side of whatever you were doing. The console then becomes an exceptions board: instead of a to-do list of things to push, it's a short list of anything that didn't go across cleanly, flagged with a count so you can see at a glance whether anything needs a look.

Either way the push is idempotent: sending the same invoice twice updates the existing one in Xero rather than creating a duplicate.

How payments follow

Once an invoice is in Xero and approved, its payments sync to the bank account you mapped, whether you recorded them by hand in 1pm or they arrived through an online card payment. The amount, date, and running balance match what 1pm shows. As covered above, a payment against a still-draft Xero invoice waits until that invoice is approved.

What syncs, and what doesn't

Worth knowing where the edges are:

What goes across: your sales invoices, itemised line by line, with tax, and their payments.
One way only. Changes you make in Xero don't come back to 1pm. Keep 1pm as your source of truth for the invoice and let Xero mirror it, rather than editing the same invoice in both places.
Not yet included: quotes, event confirmations, and credit notes stay in 1pm for now; only issued invoices sync. Everything is posted in your Xero organisation's base currency.

If something doesn't go across

The sync console is where problems surface. An invoice that failed to push shows why on its row, and a failed count appears on the Sync to Xero button so you're not relying on remembering to check. Common causes are a tax rate that hasn't been mapped yet, or a payment waiting on a Draft invoice you haven't approved in Xero. Fix the cause, then push or re-check that invoice from the console.

Quotes and invoices covers raising and sending the invoice that then syncs.
Getting paid: payments and online card payments covers recording the payments that follow the invoice across.