Xero bookkeeping services, run inside your own Xero file

Scope depends on your plan. On Growth and above, work runs through the month rather than in a burst at month-end: we reconcile the bank, card and payment-processor accounts in the Reconcile tab, code what the bank rules did not, chase the transactions nobody can identify, publish bills and receipts from Hubdoc with the source document attached, raise and send sales invoices, enter supplier bills with correct due dates, and apply payments against them so the aged reports stay real. Essentials reconciles monthly and does not include Hubdoc, invoicing or bills.

At month-end we run the close: reconcile every balance sheet account rather than just the bank, check the Bank Reconciliation Summary against the real statement balance, clear the suspense and clearing accounts, review the tracking-category split for unassigned items, and produce the profit and loss and balance sheet. Depreciation from the fixed asset register and multi-currency revaluation are scoped into your proposal where your file needs them. An ACCA-qualified accountant reviews the close before it reaches you. Then we set the lock date so the month stops moving. From Growth, the reports come with a short note on what changed and why.

You keep it, in your own name, paid on your own card. That is deliberate. A bookkeeper who owns your subscription owns your leverage, and moving away from them turns into a negotiation instead of a click.

You invite us as a user in your organisation and we work with the Adviser role, which is what unlocks the tools this job needs: Find and recode, lock dates, manual journals, the chart of accounts and the fixed asset register. Every action we take is stamped with our user name in the History and Notes of each transaction, so you can audit anything we did at any time without asking us for permission.

If you ever want us gone, you remove the user and the access ends that second. Nothing is held hostage, there is no exit fee, and we will talk your next bookkeeper through the file so the handover is clean.

This is the most expensive misunderstanding in Xero. When the Reconcile tab shows zero items to reconcile, it means every statement line Xero received has been matched or coded. It does not mean the bank account is correct.

If the feed dropped for seven days in April, those lines never arrived, so there is nothing sitting in the tab to warn you, and the file looks finished while it is missing a week of spending. The real control is the Bank Reconciliation Summary report, which compares the statement balance Xero holds against the balance in your Xero account, plus any unreconciled items.

We tie that to the closing balance on the actual PDF statement every month, for every account. Where a feed has gaps we import a statement file to fill them. Zero items in the tab is a cleared inbox, not a reconciliation, and treating one as the other is how a file balances while being wrong.

Yes. On a file that has drifted, cleanup comes first, before any monthly work. A file that needs cleanup usually shows months of transactions coded to a single catch-all expense account by an over-broad bank rule, a bank account whose Xero balance no longer matches the statement, hundreds of unreconciled lines going back a year, duplicated contacts, invoices marked paid against the wrong payment, and a suspense account nobody has opened since the last accountant left.

We work backwards from the last month you trust. Each period is reconciled properly against real statements, miscoded history is fixed in bulk with Find and recode rather than one transaction at a time, duplicate contacts are merged, and the balance sheet accounts are each supported by a schedule. You get a written list of what was wrong and what it changed.

Cleanup is quoted as a one-off fixed fee, separate from the monthly work, so you can see exactly what the backlog costs before committing. Our guide to catching up 12 months of bookkeeping walks through the same order we use.

Two active categories per organisation, each holding up to 100 options. That ceiling is fixed and it is the single most important design decision in a Xero file, because it is the one people discover too late.

If you use your two on Location and Salesperson, you cannot later add Department without giving one of them up, and the history coded to the retired category stops reporting the way it used to. So we choose them deliberately, against the reports you actually need, before anything is coded.

If you need a third dimension, there are honest options rather than pretending the limit does not exist. Job-level or client-level profitability usually belongs in Xero Projects, not a tracking category. A coarse split such as trading entity or revenue stream is often better handled in the chart of accounts with separate income and direct cost codes. And if you genuinely need three or more dimensions across large volumes, that is a reporting add-on, and we will say so rather than contort the file.

We use them heavily, and yes, they cause real damage when they are written lazily. A bank rule matches on conditions such as the payee, a text fragment in the reference or an amount range, then proposes or applies a coding.

The danger is breadth. A rule that fires on any line containing the word payment, or on a supplier who sells you both stock and office furniture, will quietly push months of transactions into the wrong account, and because the lines clear themselves the file looks healthy the whole time.

Our approach is narrow rules that must match on payee plus a second condition, no rule that spans both direct costs and overheads, and no silent auto-apply on anything that affects gross margin. Rules are reviewed at each close against what actually fired that month, and retired when a supplier changes their bank narrative. Automation is only worth having when somebody is checking what it did.

Hubdoc is included with most paid Xero subscriptions, so for a lot of small businesses it is the sensible default: nothing extra to pay, it reads the key fields off a bill or receipt, it can log into some suppliers and fetch statements itself, and it publishes into Xero with the source document attached to the transaction. That attachment is the part that matters. A year-end where every bill has its PDF on the transaction is a different experience from one that starts with searching your email.

Dext costs more and generally earns it on volume and awkward documents: better extraction on poor-quality photos and long itemised receipts, stronger supplier rules, line-item detail, and a smoother approval workflow when several people submit expenses.

Our rule of thumb is that Hubdoc is fine until the volume or the document quality starts costing us time, and at that point the subscription is cheaper than the hours. We work in both and we will tell you which one your file needs.

Yes. Xero has a tool called Find and recode, available only to users with the Adviser role. You search the file for transactions matching a condition, such as everything coded to General Expenses between January and June, review the list, and then recode the account, the tax rate or the tracking category across all of them at once. What used to be four hundred manual edits becomes one reviewed run, which keeps cleanup hours down.

There are real limits and we work inside them. It cannot touch a period that is closed by a lock date, so the lock has to be moved deliberately and put back afterwards. Not every transaction type is eligible. And every run is written to the Find and recode history, which is exactly why we always run a narrow test batch, check the effect on the profit and loss, and only then apply the full recode.

Often not, and this is where we will talk you out of Xero alone. Xero's inventory is deliberately simple. It tracks quantities and values for inventory items, values them on average cost, and posts cost of goods sold when you sell them. For a business holding a modest range of finished goods bought in and sold on, that is genuinely enough.

It stops being enough quickly. There is no landed cost allocation, so freight, duty and import charges do not get pushed into the unit cost of the stock they belong to, and your gross margin is overstated until someone adjusts it manually. There is no manufacturing or assembly, no bill of materials, no batch or serial tracking, and no multi-warehouse stock control.

If any of that describes you, the answer is a dedicated inventory system such as Unleashed, Cin7 or Katana feeding Xero, with Xero doing what it is good at. We would rather say that at the quoting stage than fix a wrong margin every month.

No. We do not file tax returns of any kind and we do not audit, and we would rather be blunt about that than take the work and disappoint you.

What we do is prepare the file so filing is a short job for whoever is authorised to do it. That means every transaction carries the right tax rate rather than a default, the tax accounts on the balance sheet reconcile to the amounts actually owed, the periods are locked so the numbers cannot shift after they have been reported, and any prior-period adjustment is documented rather than quietly absorbed. For UK businesses, it means the VAT return figures are already in Xero, ready for your agent to submit to HMRC under Making Tax Digital.

Your accountant, agent or CPA then reviews and submits from a file that supports itself. A file that already reconciles gives your tax professional less to rebuild before they can file.