Stock control

Exporting to Xero

Send received supplier invoices to Xero as bills, with per-supplier contacts, account codes and payment terms that set the due date.

Exporting to Xero

If you keep your books in Xero, Stock can post your supplier invoices for you as Accounts Payable bills, so the delivery you just checked in doesn't have to be typed up a second time. Everything to do with it lives under Settings, in Xero Export.

Before you start

Stock uses the same Xero connection your POS already has — there's no second login and no separate authorisation. If you haven't connected Xero yet, do it in your POS admin first, under Settings → Integrations → Xero. The top of the Xero Export screen tells you which Xero organisation you're connected to, or says so plainly if you aren't connected yet.

Company-wide defaults

Three settings apply to every bill unless a supplier overrides them:

Purchases account — where stock purchases are coded (cost of goods sold, typically). Pick it from the list; you don't type a code. The list is your own chart of accounts as imported into your POS, narrowed to the accounts you marked as ones a supplier bill may be coded to. If it's empty, the chart hasn't been imported yet — do that first in your POS admin, under Settings → Integrations → Xero, and the list fills in.
Tax type — the tax treatment applied to bill lines, chosen from the purchase-side tax rates you shortlisted during that same import. For most Australian businesses this is GST on Expenses. A supplier, or an individual product, can override it where the treatment genuinely differs.
Posting status — whether bills arrive in Xero as Draft, for you to check and approve there, or as Authorised, posted directly. Start on Draft; move to Authorised once you've watched a few come through and trust them.

Per-supplier settings

Below the defaults is a row for each of your suppliers, where you can set:

Xero contact — search your real Xero contacts and pick the right one. If the supplier doesn't exist in Xero yet, type the name and choose to create it. Left blank, Stock looks for a Xero contact whose name matches the supplier's exactly, and creates one if there isn't a match — so it's worth setting deliberately for any supplier whose name in Stock differs from the name in Xero.
Account and Tax type — override the company defaults for this supplier, chosen from the same lists. Leave either blank and the company default applies; the control shows you what that default currently is.
Payment terms — a number of days, counted either from invoice date or from end of month. This is what sets the bill's due date in Xero. Leave it blank and bills are due on their invoice date.

How payment terms work out

Terms of 30 days from invoice date on an invoice dated 12 March give a due date of 11 April. The same 30 days from end of month counts from 31 March instead, giving 30 April — which is how most "30 days EOM" supplier accounts actually work. Getting this right is the difference between Xero showing your whole payables ledger as overdue and it showing you what you genuinely owe this week.

Coding individual products and charges

Most businesses never need to go below the supplier. But a supplier who delivers goods and charges for the delivery is billing you for two different things, and your accountant will usually want them in two different accounts.

Expand a supplier row and you'll see everything you buy from them, in two groups: Stock items first, then Charges — the delivery fees, fuel levies and pallet deposits. Each one has its own account and tax type.

Blank means inherit, not "none". A blank control doesn't show you an empty box; it shows the value that will actually be posted, greyed out, with where it came from — inherited from supplier, or inherited from company. So you can read a whole supplier's coding at a glance and see which lines have been deliberately set and which are simply following the default.

Account and tax type are inherited separately. A GST-free product bought from a supplier you otherwise pay GST to needs its own tax type but the same account, and setting one doesn't disturb the other.

To change several at once, tick the rows and use Set account for selected or Set tax type for selected above the list. If a supplier has a long list, the search box narrows it before you select.

Nothing here is required. A product with no coding of its own falls back to its supplier, and then to your company defaults — which is the right answer for almost everything you buy.

What gets posted

A bill contains the goods you actually received, at the quantities and prices you were actually billed — not what you originally ordered — plus every charge on the invoice: delivery fees, fuel levies, pallet deposits and the like. Charges are never received into stock, but they are part of what the supplier is owed, so they are part of the bill. Where you resolved a shortfall as a credit while receiving, Stock also posts a matching credit note against the same supplier, so the bill reflects the invoice you were sent and the credit reflects what didn't turn up. See Managing invoices for how receiving and resolving works.

Each line is coded on its own: the product's own account and tax code if it has one, otherwise the supplier's, otherwise the company default. That is what lets a delivery fee land in a freight account while the goods on the same invoice go to purchases.

Every line needs an account code to post. If a line has none, or is still pointing at an account or tax rate you have since archived or stopped using for purchases, Stock records the problem against the invoice and posts nothing — rather than guessing an account and leaving you to find it at reconciliation.

The same invoice is never posted twice, however many times the export runs.

Prices that include GST

Australian supplier invoices usually print prices with the GST already in them. Stock reads that off the invoice and tells Xero which way to take the prices it sends, so the bill in Xero comes to what the supplier actually charged you — not ten per cent more.

Xero applies one answer to a whole bill: either every price on it includes GST, or none of them do. Almost always that matches the invoice, because a supplier prints their prices one way throughout, and lines with no GST on them at all sit happily either way.

Very occasionally a scanned invoice comes out with some lines read one way and some the other. Stock won't post that bill — it tells you which lines disagree, because there is no way to send it that wouldn't bill part of it wrong by the GST. Re-import the invoice and it will normally read cleanly the second time.

A note on timing

The export runs on a schedule rather than on a button: Stock checks each hour for received invoices that are ready to post. An invoice becomes ready once it's been fully received and finalised — which is what Complete Invoice does at the end of receiving a delivery.

So there's nothing to press to send a bill, and nothing to remember. Finish receiving, complete the invoice, and the bill appears in Xero within the hour. Do set up the pages above first, though: per-supplier terms and account codes are the part that takes longest to get right, and an invoice that completes before they're set is recorded with the problem against it rather than posted.

What Stock doesn't do

Stock posts purchases. Your sales, tips, tax and takings continue to reach Xero through the POS reports (End of day and Accounting), and none of those settings change here.