Shopify and Xero

Shopify into Xero, orders and all

One Shopify order can be paid three different ways and reach your bank on three different days. We connect Shopify to Xero so the sale, the fees and the refunds each land in their own account. The clearing account then comes back to zero, which is how you know the month is right.

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What goes wrong without it

The order is not the deposit

A storefront takes the money through whichever gateway the customer chose, and each one settles net, in its own batch, on its own schedule. Everything below follows from that. The clearing account is where it shows: a balance that never returns to zero is unmapped transactions, not a rounding difference.

One order, several gateways Shopify Payments, PayPal and buy-now-pay-later each deposit separately, so no single bank line matches the order it came from.

Fees taken before the money lands The deposit is the sale minus the gateway's fee. Banked as income, revenue is understated and the fee never appears as a cost at all.

A clearing account that only grows Sales in one side, deposits out the other, and a balance that never clears means something is landing in the wrong place every day.

What you get

A store that reconciles to the cent

Gross sales, gateway fees and refunds split apart, so income is income and the fee is a cost

Every gateway mapped separately, so a deposit can be traced to the orders behind it

A clearing account that returns to zero, which is the test that the mapping is right

Where cost of goods is recognised agreed before anything is switched on, not left to a default

GST checked on every mapped account against your circumstances, never assumed

A full settlement cycle reconciled against the bank before it is handed over

Diagram of a Shopify order in Xero: the order is paid through Shopify Payments, PayPal or buy-now-pay-later, sales go into the clearing account while fees, refunds and deposits come out the other side, each gateway's deposit is traced to its orders, and the clearing account comes back to zero — What goes into the clearing account has to come out again: the fees, the refunds and each gateway's deposit.

How it works

Three steps, in this order

1 Agree the mapping before anything is switched on Where the sale, each gateway's fees, the refunds, the cost of goods and the GST should land, decided first. Unpicking it later costs more than doing it once.

2 Connect it and run a real settlement cycle The connection configured, then watched across a full cycle on every gateway you take money through, so you see it work rather than take our word for it.

3 Clear the clearing account before we hand it over You do not get left with a live connection until the clearing account returns to zero and the period reconciles against the bank.

When the standard connection stops short

Where the connector ends, we build

Shopify's own Xero connection brings the orders and the payouts across, and for many stores that is enough. It stops being enough the moment your reporting needs something the connector was never asked to know. That might be which product line a sale belongs to, which channel it came through, or which campaign or location it should sit under.

Where a platform has no Xero connector at all, or the one it has cannot code a transaction the way your business reports, we build the connection that can. Everything we automate arrives in Xero as a draft for a person to review and approve, because ownership of what reaches your ledger stays with you.

Coding the connector cannot reach Tracking categories, product lines, channels or a job carried onto the transaction, so a report by any of them can be relied on.

The platforms with no connector at all Order systems, subscription tools and CRMs that Xero has never been introduced to. If the data follows a pattern, the pattern can be automated.

Spreadsheets, email and folders of PDFs A supplier invoice that arrives as an attachment, or a stock sheet somebody maintains by hand, turned into coded drafts without anyone retyping them.

A person still approves it Nothing posts itself. Every automated transaction lands as a draft for review, so a human owns what enters the ledger.

If somebody exports a Shopify report every month to work out what the numbers in Xero mean, that is worth a conversation.

Joanna, Jitka, Nikoletta and Zsuzsa of NN Accountability, from left to right, together — From left: Joanna, Jitka, Nikoletta and Zsuzsa

One business, before and after

A high-volume Shopify store that wanted less bookkeeping

A busy store that did not want to reconcile sale by sale.

Before The Shopify clearing account had never been reconciled. Fees were not allocated correctly, and the balance was out.

What we changed We automated the fees, mapped how each payout reconciles in Xero, and made sure the clearing account is reconciled regularly.

After No sale-by-sale reconciliation. Fees land in the right account, and the clearing account is reconciled regularly instead of drifting.

Who it suits

Who this is for

Online stores Anyone selling through a storefront and taking money more than one way. WooCommerce as well The same work where the store runs on your own site. Stripe and Square The gateways underneath, each with fees of their own. Custom integrations What one looks like when a platform's own connection stopped matching the coding.

Questions we answer every week

Questions we are asked most

Does Shopify integrate with Xero? Yes, and the connection is the easy part. What decides whether it helps is the mapping: whether the sale, each gateway's fees, the refunds and the cost of goods land in the right accounts, and whether the clearing account returns to zero. Switched on without that, it produces a great deal of tidy data that does not agree with your bank.

We take payments through more than one gateway. Does that matter? It is the main thing that makes a storefront harder than a single terminal. Shopify Payments, PayPal and buy-now-pay-later each take their own fee and deposit on their own schedule, so one order can be split across three bank lines on three days. Each gateway is mapped separately, which is what lets a deposit be traced back to the orders behind it.

What about GST on the gateway fees? It is decided against your circumstances and checked, rather than left at whatever the integration defaults to. Getting it wrong is quiet, and it carries into every activity statement afterwards, which is exactly why it is agreed before anything is switched on rather than found later.

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