Bookkeeping¶
One balanced journal per trading day, ready to import into Xero.
Where: menu → Sales → Bookkeeping. It opens on yesterday.
It changes nothing. This screen reads your sales and cash-ups and presents them. Nothing here can alter a sale.
Before the first time¶
Open Chart of accounts (the gear icon) and go through the codes with your accountant. Sales income and GST match Xero's standard NZ chart; most of the rest are accounts you need to create.
Setting up Xero is the full list, the trial-import step, and the answers to what your accountant will ask.
Reading the day¶
The badges across the top say what went into the journal and what did not:
| Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|
| n settled | Orders included: paid in full, not cancelled |
| n unsettled excluded | Part-paid orders, left out until they settle |
| n cancelled excluded | Cancelled orders |
| n cashup(s) | Cash-ups included |
| No cashup for this day | No count was done, so there is no over/short line |
| n using fallback totals | Worth a look |
| n account/voucher carve-outs | On-account and voucher movements |
Then Balanced (debit x = credit y), or Unbalanced — residual z.
What the lines mean¶
- Sales income is gross and ex-GST. Discounts and loyalty rewards are their own debit lines rather than being netted off, so the cost of doing business stays visible.
- GST is posted as its own explicit line.
- Cash clearing is the day's bankable cash; card clearing is the terminal settlement. These are what you reconcile against the bank feed.
- Cash over/short is the till variance against the cash-up count.
- Wastage is posted at cost, one line per reason so staff meals stay separate from spoilage, and offset against COGS so the spend is not counted twice.
On-account sales are income on the day of the sale. Paying the account off later just clears the balance; it is not income again. Gift vouchers are the other way round: selling one is not income, redeeming one is.
Exporting¶
Export Xero CSV shares a file named for the site and the date. In Xero: Accounting → Manual journals → Import.
Every row carries "No GST" on purpose. GST is already its own line, and without that flag Xero would calculate tax on top and double it.
Export is blocked in two cases:
- "Nothing to export — no settled sales this day."
- "Journal is unbalanced by $x — fix the underlying data before exporting." An imbalance means the day's data needs looking at, not that the export is broken.
If a day looks wrong¶
- A part-paid tab is excluded until it settles, and shows as a small cash-over in the meantime.
- A day with no cash-up gets no over/short line at all.
- Trading past midnight splits a session across two days. The journal is per calendar day, so a late night lands partly on the next one. A per-cash-up journal is the planned fix.
More: Setting up Xero. The ? icon in the app has the same guidance and links here.