Get subscription invoices and payments into Xero without retyping

If you bill on subscriptions and keep your books in Xero, you know the monthly chore. An invoice goes out, a card payment lands, and someone has to make Xero agree. Retyping is slow, and it is where mistakes creep in.

NicelyBilled can send your customers, invoices and payments to Xero for you. This article covers the setup, the two account choices that matter, and what you will see in Xero afterwards.

What ends up in Xero

Here is what NicelyBilled sends:

• Contacts. Each account's billing contact becomes a Xero contact. It is created, then updated when the billing contact changes.
• Invoices. Finalised invoices arrive as approved (AUTHORISED) invoices.
• Payments. Money received, including payments, top-ups and card payments, arrives as a customer prepayment (credit). It is allocated to the invoice it settles. If there is money left over, it stays as available credit on the contact.
• Credit notes. If an unpaid invoice is carried into a later one, a credit note is applied to the original. That way nothing is billed twice.

One detail helps with reconciliation. An account's balance is the leftover unallocated credit on the Xero contact. It shows up on its own. There is no separate step to push a balance across.

Connecting your Xero organisation

You do this on the Integrations tab. You need the Manage tenant settings permission.

1. Click Connect to Xero and approve access in Xero.
2. You are sent back to NicelyBilled. The header shows which organisation is connected. Check it is the right one.

If your login has more than one organisation

A single Xero login often covers several organisations, for example your real company and Xero's Demo Company. NicelyBilled does not guess. You will see a Choose your Xero organisation prompt. Pick one, and you are sent back to Xero briefly to confirm.

If you skip that choice, nothing is connected. On Xero's consent screen you can also grant access to just the one organisation you want. Either way, it is worth a ten-second check before anything syncs into the wrong set of books.

Choosing the payment account and the sales account

After connecting, you pick two accounts.

Payment account (required). This is the Xero bank account that card payments are recorded against. Until you set it, payments cannot sync. You can change it at any time.

Think about which account your payment processor's payouts actually reach, because that is the one you will be reconciling against.

Revenue account (optional). This is the income account that invoice and prepayment lines post to. The default is Sales · 200. Leave it alone unless your chart of accounts is different. If you have renamed or renumbered your income accounts, choose the one you want subscription revenue to land in.

How sync behaves day to day

Sync runs in the background and finishes within a few minutes. Things turn green shortly after they happen, not instantly. So if you issue an invoice and check Xero straight away, give it a few minutes.

On an account's Invoices tab, each invoice shows its Xero state: Synced, Syncing or Failed. Anything that failed has a retry option.

"Sync account first"

An invoice can only sync once its account exists in Xero as a contact. If an invoice says Sync account first, use Sync to Xero on the account. That creates the contact, and the invoices follow.

Bringing across history from before you connected

Sync only covers events after you connect. Anything older was never sent. Backfill replays it in this order: contact, invoices, credit notes, then payments. It is safe to run repeatedly, since it just picks up what is new. It skips void invoices and payments.

• One account. On the account page, use Sync to Xero (full history). It tells you straight away how much was queued.
• All accounts. On Integrations, use Sync all accounts to Xero. This runs as a background job you can watch, and you can leave the page. Large workspaces finish over several runs.

Read the backfill numbers as "queued", not "in Xero". They count what was lined up to send. Watch the indicators on each invoice and account to see what has actually arrived.

Payments taken outside the card system

Not every payment is a card charge. On the Invoices tab you can record a payment taken outside NicelyBilled, such as a bank transfer. You can also add credit to an account's balance and have an invoice covered from that balance. See Invoices & payments for how each works.

The Xero help describes money received, covering payments, top-ups and card payments, arriving as a prepayment allocated to the invoice it settles. It does not spell out every case for manually recorded payments. So the first time you record a bank transfer, check how it looks in Xero before you rely on it.

A short checklist for the first month

1. Connect the right organisation and confirm its name in the header.
2. Set the payment account to the bank account you reconcile against.
3. Check the revenue account matches your chart of accounts.
4. Run backfill if you have invoices from before the connection.
5. After the first billing run, open a few invoices in Xero. Confirm each is approved, that the payment is allocated to it, and that the amounts match.
6. Look through the Invoices tab for anything marked Failed, and retry it.

Fixes for common problems

Payments are not reconciling. Recording payments in Xero needs the bank-transactions permission. If you connected before that permission was added, disconnect and reconnect so the new authorisation includes it.

You need to switch organisations. Connecting a different organisation replaces the connection. It resets the per-account sync mappings and clears the selected payment and revenue accounts, because they belonged to the old organisation. Pick the payment account again for the new one.

You want to pause syncing. Disconnecting stops syncing until you reconnect.

Next step

Open the Integrations tab and check which Xero organisation is shown. The full reference is on the Xero integration help page.