Xero (accounting)
Connect your Xero organisation so invoices, payments and fees post straight into your club accounts, and map payment categories to account codes.
Connecting Xero means your treasurer stops typing everything twice. Invoices Rowbot raises appear in Xero, payments are reconciled against them, and each kind of income lands in the account you nominated - so the year-end picture builds itself as the season runs.
You need the Admin role in Rowbot, and a Xero login with permission to post transactions in the organisation you are connecting.
Connect your organisation
Open Financials → Integrations and press Set up on the Xero card.
Authorise Rowbot in Xero and pick the organisation to connect. If your club has more than one, choose carefully - this is where every invoice will land.
Choose your default income account. This is where membership and general income is recorded. The sync cannot be switched on without it.
Map your payment categories to the accounts you want each kind of income to hit.
Connecting on its own changes nothing in Xero. Nothing is posted until the mapping is complete, so you can connect, look around, and finish later.
Payment categories are the mapping
Rowbot does not ask you to pick an account code every time you raise an invoice. Instead your club defines payment categories - "Membership", "Race entries", "Kit", "Social" - and each one carries its accounting treatment: the Xero account it posts to, and its tax treatment.
That means the people raising invoices choose a category in plain English, and the accounting correctness lives in one place a treasurer controls. Categories are managed under Financials → Settings.
Get a mapping wrong and income lands in the wrong account - annoying, but fixable. Change the mapping and future invoices follow the new account; already-posted invoices stay where they were, exactly as they would if you had typed them in by hand. Fix those in Xero.
What actually syncs
- Contacts. Members become Xero contacts, matched on email so you do not end up with duplicates for someone who is already in your ledger.
- Invoices. Each finalised Rowbot invoice posts as a Xero invoice, with its line items coded to their categories' accounts.
- Payments. When an invoice is paid, the payment is recorded against the Xero invoice so it reconciles rather than sitting as an unmatched bank line.
- Refunds and credit notes. Reversals post too, so a refunded payment does not leave your accounts overstated.
Keeping the two in step
Things drift. A webhook is missed, Xero is briefly unavailable, someone edits an invoice on one side. Rowbot re-checks recent activity on a schedule and repairs what it can by itself.
When something genuinely cannot sync - a deleted account code, a permissions change, an invoice Xero rejects - the failure is recorded on the invoice and raised in Financials → Needs attention. That matters: a club that only ever looks at Xero would otherwise never learn that its books had quietly stopped being complete.
What's next
- GoCardless and Stripe - the money coming in.
- Invoices and bulk charges - raising the invoices that end up here.