Setting up your Xero Integration with Xero Practice Manager: Invoice Settings

To set up your Xero integration settings for Xero Practice Manager go to Business>Settings>Xero. The area we are working with below are the invoice settings that determine the information sent from Xero Practice Manager to Xero.

Export As:

Export your invoices as drafts, as we may need to add information to those invoices in Xero prior to sending them to our customers. This is much easier to do on a Xero draft invoice.

Invoice Number Sequence:

Use the Xero numbering sequence, especially where you have fixed-price agreements or Xero repeating invoices set up. You want your XPM invoices to stay in time with this numbering sequence.

Include Invoice Description:

Including invoice descriptions from your XPM invoices through to your Xero draft invoices is optional. It is rarely used as we take our invoice descriptions either from the job description or from the tasks and costs that make up that job. If in doubt, tick this on and if you find yourself constantly removing these descriptions from your Xero invoices, then you can tick it off at any time.

Invoice details: Invoice format

There are three options here, none of which work for all scenarios, so you will have to select the option that causes you the least effort.

Option A: Job or miscellaneous invoice total

If you’d prefer to send a single-line invoice to your clients, select ‘Job or miscellaneous invoice total’. This will be a free-type description using the job description field which populates the Xero invoice with the text. This is the most commonly used option as it gives you the ability to write a paragraph description for the work completed. The downside of this method is if you want to break out the invoice into multiple lines, this will need to be done in Xero once the invoice is posted through. In this case, option B might be better for you.

Option B: Individual tasks and costs

This option sends to Xero all of the individual Task and Cost line items from your XPM to your Xero, including task descriptions and cost notes if you choose to. This provides more detail but ends up creating more work for you if you typically send a single-line or paragraph blurb describing your services. This is because you will have to edit the invoice in Xero to remove these itemised invoice lines. If this is you, option A might be better for you.

Option C: Time sheet notes

The most invoice details you can send to Xero from XPM are task name, time sheet date, time sheet notes and time sheet hours. You will need to use option B above combined with the task description - time detail setting found at ‘Business > Settings > Practice Settings > Time Sheet Notes’. This works best for any hourly based consulting type invoices you may generate where you itemise the time spent on the various activities. What is missing here is staff name and staff rates.  Where multiple staff may work on a task at different rates, Xero will default the quantity to ‘1’ and use the total line item value for the unit price.

The best option

The challenge we are faced with here is that we can only select one invoice format to control the way all of the invoices that we generate are sent to Xero. Neither of the three options above will work well for all jobs you may have in your practice. If you opt for more detail arriving in your Xero, you’ll be editing invoices for jobs that are fixed price with a single-line description. If you opt for less detail, you’ll be needing to copy and paste time-sheet detail from XPM or write your own descriptions for tasks where we may invoice on the hourly rate.

The most common option used is option A, but the option that is best for you will be determined by the volume of invoices you have for each type. It is okay to update this setting in the future, however we do not want to be updating this setting each time we create new invoices.