Xero integration

Data flow between Qblue Inventory and Xero:

Xero integration data flow with Qblue Inventory Management

Contacts
The new customer or supplier will be synchronised to Xero when an invoice or bill is entered. If no match is found after searching for a match by the company name, it then creates a new contact on Xero.

Sales invoices
There are two ways to trigger a sales order to sync:

when the sales order is finalised with no more changes to be made (except for some header information)
when an invoice (or credit note) is generated after the sales order is shipped and fulfilled (or part fulfilled)

There are options to enable or disable the sales invoices sync.

Both sales invoices and bills can be selected to sync as a Draft, Awaiting approval or Authorised.

Sync sent status when invoice is emailed during ship out

When invoices are synced to Xero, these can be marked as "Sent" automatically when.these two conditions are met:

The "Send invoices as" is set at "Authorised" as Xero does not track "Sent" status for Draft invoices
The "Email to {customer's email}" tickbox is ticked when committing a sales order from the "Ship out & invoice" page.

COGS
The cost of goods sold related to sales invoices can be synced simultaneously with the invoices themselves or in a batch. The COGS will be sent as a zero value bill.

Purchase bills
When a local currency purchase order is partially or fully receipted, a bill is produced.

In contrast, purchase orders made in foreign currencies go through the landed cost calculations, where the charges of shipping or importation might be added to the landed costs of the finished product.

Upon the posting of the landed cost calculation, the respective bills will be generated.

Inventory adjustments
These are stock adjustments or adjustments made from stocktake postings. The adjustments will be sent as a zero value bill.

Payments made on invoices and bills
The Xero payments made on bills and invoices can sync back to Qblue Inventory. These will be applied to the relevant invoices and bills, after which you can view whether they are paid or unpaid by choosing one of the options below:

Sales menu then Invoices & credits
Reports menu then customers or suppliers ageing

Option: don't include non-diminishing costs in COGS:
When a non-diminishing (or non stock) product is entered into a sales order, if this non stock item has an unit cost, then its cost will not be sent or included as part of the cost of goods sold batch. For example: non stock products such as LABOUR, MISC, DEPOSIT and so on. Our default option is to include the non-diminishing products costs and it caters for using a non-stock SKU for one-off buying products without having to create lots of one-off SKUs.

For non-diminishing products, the unit cost can be entered into a sales order into the highlighted field like the below:

Getting started: connect to Xero

During your free trial or after the upgrade of your dedicated live production database, connect to your Xero account at any time.

To connect to your Xero account:

Click on your name initials (top right-hand side of the page)
Choose Integrations
Choose Xero
Click on the "Connect to Xero" button and follow the on-screen prompts

After the connection is setup

Once connected, select the different sync options and then:

Choose or enter the GL account mappings (see below)
If needed, import contacts from Xero. Note: skip this step if the customers and suppliers card files have already been imported
If needed, import unpaid invoices, un-allocated overpayments and bills from Xero

Account mappings

There are three ways to map transactions to different GL codes:

Default account mappings: on the Settings page (see here), under the "Xero account mapping" section, these are the system's default GL code mappings for sending transactions to Xero.
Sales codes by Product types: On top of the default codes, you can set different mappings for different product types, to do this, click on the blue button "Set account mappings for individual product types", then edit the accounts for sales, cogs and inventory movements
Sales codes by Customer specific: Some customers might choose to have different sales codes, to do this:
- Assign the customer to a pre-fined sales account from the CRM companies page.
  Edit the customer card file, click Options on the left hand side Access menu, then choose from the "Default sales account" dropdown box.
- To map the customer specific sales codes, on the Xero's integration settings page, click on "Map customer sales accounts"

If the POS payments sync is enabled, fill in the "Payment account (bank or an account accepts payaments)" like below:

Migrating product data from Xero

We do not sync data on inventory product items (or SKUs or product codes) from & to Xero with our Xero interface. Please export the product data from Xero before importing it using the "Import data" tool found in the Products dropdown menu.

We offer a default set of accounts for sales, cogs, and inventory for account mapping for products, and a different set of accounts can be used for various product types.

To do that, go to the Xero settings page, and click on the button like below:

This is provided that the products have been imported and their types are entered.

Trouble shooting logs

All synchronisation events are logged with details and in event of any errors, the error details can be found on the logs.

To access the logs:

go to the Xero page under Integrations.
click Sync queue (on the left Access menu)

On the logs, you can search for an invoice number, bill number or the Cogs batch number. If the line is marked "Is error" then check the error detail and try to fix what it needs.

See the screenshot below for an example:

Sample GL mappings (to verify the mappings, please check with your accountant):

Demo video

Watch the demonstration video on how our Xero integration works:

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Bills rounding line

When a bill is sent from Qblue Inventory to Xero, a rounding line may be inserted in order to balance the total amounts between the two systems.

The reason behind this is because Qblue Inventory allows discount percentage to be entered against the purchase order line items.

Whereas Xero does not have the field for a bill line percentage discount (as at 18 Jan 2022).

For example:

The bill below shows a rounding line inserted making the Subtotal to $19,322.63

This subtotal matches to that of the bill on Qblue Inventory.

The original line price = $1,299.00

With a line discount % = 12.5%

When sync to Xero, the Unit Price has been rounded to 2 decimal places.

Purchase orders to Xero

Qblue sends supplier bills and invoices to Xero and flagged them with a status of either Draft or Authorised (a configurable setting).

When these are paid on Xero, the payments are imported to Qblue to automatically offset the outstanding invoice amounts.

Un-posted POs do not get sent to Xero because all aspects of the orders can be managed on Qblue.

These include:

Printing & emailing
Update shipment status
Update supplier ETA dates
Prepare landed cost calculations to distribute/prorata shipment costs onto products
Edit purchase orders with supplier discount percentages
Work with supplier product descriptions, units and unit conversions.
Partial receipts
Upload supplier packing slip, POD and shipment documents against the purchase order
Record and view revisions or history of the order

FAQS

Q: How do I disconnect from Xero?

A: To disconnect from Xero, you can do either of the following:

Go to Integrations then Xero, click on the button "Disconnect from Xero"
Or you can disconnect the Qblue Inventory app from within your Xero account in Settings then Connected Apps

Q: What doesn’t your integration do?

A: The integration does not send or import product items and codes

Q: How do I reconcile sales data synced to Xero?

A: To see a list of invoices or bills that have been synced to Xero:

For invoices: go to Sales menu then "Invoices & credits";
The last column, "Exported to," displays "Xero" if it has been sent, and "Sync error" in red if there were any problems with the particular invoice.
For bills, go to Purchases menu then "Bills"
Likewise, the "Exported to" column shows the export status.

Q: When and how does data sync occur? Is it manual, automatic, on login, in real-time. Are there any settings related to synchronizing?

A: The connection is first set up by default to automatically sync on a regular basis. Otherwise, you can disable automatic syncing from the Settings page on Integrations then Xero.

Q: How do I see the sync logs?

A: To view the synchronisation logs:

Go to Integrations, then Xero
Click "Sync queue" on the left
The sync messages with their details are shown in the Sync history window.
You can enter a string to search, for example search for an invoice number or a adjustment batch.

Q: Does Qblue send SKU information to Xero?

A: Qblue does not send SKU item codes or quantities to Xero. For inventory related transactions, it sends COGS and supplier bill values to Xero.

For example:
Cogs:

DR Cost of goods sold
CR Inventory on hand

Bills:

Product lines are coded to inventory on hand as per GL accounts mapping

Inventory adjustments:

DR/CR Inventory adjustment GL/Cogs
CR/DR Inventory on hand

Our Xero integration has a sync schedule of every 1.5 hours, this is to allow time for you to make any adjustments to invoices/bills before they are synced across. You can always trigger a "Sync now" at any time, from the Xero integrations page.

Q: How to assign a default sales account for a customer?

A: To do that:

    - Edit a customer
    - Click "Options" on the left
    - Select a sales account in the "Default sales account" dropdown, or click on the pencil icon next to the prompt label to add/edit accounts

Once done, map this account to Xero by:

    - Click on your name initials (top right)
    - Integrations > Xero
    - Settings (on the left)
    - Scroll down to the mappings section
    - And click "Map customer sales accounts"

Q: How to check or reconcile what transactions have been sent to Xero?

A: The reconciliation can be managed by looking at the following pages:

    For sales invoices/credit notes: Sales menu > Invoices & credits
        - You can see which invoice or credit note has been synced to Xero or not.
        - Once a payment has been allocated to an invoice on Xero, it gets imported and allocated on Qblue. The "Due" column shows how much each invoice is owing.
        - Click "Not sent to Xero" yet to view those have not been synced to Xero.
        - If an invoice is failed to sync for whatever reason, the error can be seen clearly in red on the last column.
    For supplier bills: Purchases menu > Supplier bills

Also, to view the sync log, go to the Xero integration page and view the "Sync history" at the bottom of the page.

GL Journals

These are the standard GL journals that get synced to Xero:

		Determine the GL account to use
Journal type	GL entries	Standard products	Non-diminishing products	Advanced setting
Sales invoice	Sales income (revenue)	GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default mapping	Checks the product level GL mapping, if not found, GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default mapping	If no product GL is found, use the customer's default sales account (if any)
Invoice shipping (not entered as a line item)	Shipping paid by customers (revenue)
Cost of goods sold	Inventory on hand or purchases (current asset) vs Cost of goods sold (Cogs/expense)	GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default mapping	Checks the product level GL mapping, if not found, GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default mapping
	For a non-diminishing product, by default, if it has a cost either via "Last buy price", FIFO or entered directly into the sales order, then it is included in the COGS upload batch. This behavior can be disabled from the integration settings page, that is, not to send COGS for non-diminishing products.
Purchase supplier bills	Inventory on hand or purchases (current asset)	GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default mapping	Checks the product level GL mapping, if not found, GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default mapping
Purchase bill shipping (not entered as a line item and not pro-rata onto the products)	Supplier shipping & freight (Cogs or expense)
Inventory adjustments / stock take	Inventory on hand or purchases (current asset) vs Inventory adjustments and cost calculation roundings (expense)	Inventory GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default inventory mapping	Checks the product level inventory GL mapping, if not found, GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default inventory mapping
Cost variances	Inventory on hand or purchases (current asset) vs Cost variance calculations (Cogs/expense)	Inventory GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default inventory mapping	Checks the product level inventory GL mapping, if not found, GL mapping in product type, if not found, use default inventory mapping

If you have any questions, ask us by creating a help desk ticket.

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