Why are debtors in Xero Practice Manager unreliable?

Although Xero Practice Manager (XPM) does have an invoicing area that integrates payments 'upward' from Xero (blue) at the time of invoice reconciliation, no debtor based reports in XPM are reliable because of the inability of the XPM+Xero integration to handle:

• Pre-payments
• Multi-invoice payments
• Split payments
• Over payments
• Credit notes
• Other variations to a normal reconciliation

This makes the debtors in XPM close to useless for reporting purposes. Xero (blue) is your best source for reliable debtor information. Reconciling your Xero (blue) and XPM debtors is not a good use of anyone's time.

If the Partners in your practice are responsible for chasing up and managing their own debtors, below is the best way to manage this:

Measuring Debtors by Partner with Xero Practice Manager

Another scenario where debtor information is useful for job delivery occurs in practices where job or client-managers start a job only once an invoice is paid. Your best option here would be to invite them into your practices Xero (blue) with 'Invoice Only (Sales)' permissions. This will provide them the most timely and accurate debtor information without providing them access to the remainder of your practices Xero. For this process to work well you will need your practice bank accounts reconciled in Xero daily.

The only alternatively is for someone to reconcile your Xero (blue) and XPM debtors list each day which is painful and time consuming. If you are stuck in this scenario the easiest method is to build a XPM custom report using the Invoice report type and reconcile this with your Xero (blue) Account Transaction report (not any debtors reports) selecting each of your income account types for XPM related income.