Square and Xero

Square into Xero, takings that tally

A day on the terminal and the deposit in your bank are two different numbers, and the difference is fees. We connect Square to Xero so takings, fees and refunds each land in their own account, which means the day tallies without anybody working backwards from the bank.

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What goes wrong without it

The deposit is not the takings

Square settles net, a day at a time. Everything below follows from that, and each one leaves a till that balances against a bank that does not. If your bank reconciliation is out, everything downstream is out with it.

Fees taken before the money lands The deposit is the day's takings minus Square's fee. Banked as income, revenue is understated and the fee is invisible.

A day's trading as one number Hundreds of sales arriving as a single deposit, so the category that is quietly losing money looks exactly like the one that is not.

Refunds and surcharges left in the total Both change what reaches the bank without changing what was sold, and neither separates itself unless the connection is set up to do it.

What you get

A till that agrees with the bank

Gross takings, Square fees and refunds split apart, so income is income and the fee is a cost

Each day's settlement matched to the sales it covers, instead of banked as one figure

Surcharges and refunds separated out rather than absorbed into the total

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

Multiple registers or locations kept apart, so you can see which one pays its way

A settled week reconciled against the bank before it is handed over

How it works

Three steps, in this order

1 Agree the mapping before anything is switched on Where the gross, the fee, the refunds and the GST should land, decided first. Unpicking it later costs more than doing it once.

2 Connect it and run a real trading week The connection configured, then watched across a settled week, so you see the gross, the fee and the net arrive separately rather than take our word for it.

3 Reconcile before we hand it over You do not get left with a live connection until a settled week reconciles against the bank.

When the standard connection stops short

Where the connector ends, we build

Square's own Xero connection brings the data across, and for many businesses that is enough. It stops being enough the moment your reporting needs something the connector was never asked to know: which site, which register, which product line, or a job the takings belong to. 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 Sites, registers, product lines or a job carried onto the transaction, so a report by any of them holds up.

The platforms with no connector at all Practice software, order systems 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 Supplier invoices that arrive as attachments, or a stocktake somebody keeps 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 is still working backwards from the bank to find out what a day sold, that is worth a conversation.

Cafes, restaurants and shops

Bookkeeping for a business that takes card payments all day

Hospitality and retail bookkeeping has a rhythm nothing else has: takings every day, fees off every one of them, and a wages bill that moves with the roster. Whether you run one cafe or several sites, the work is the same shape, and Square sits in the middle of it.

The day closed off properly Takings, fees, surcharges and refunds separated as the day settles, so nobody reconstructs a Tuesday three weeks later.

Sites and registers kept apart Each location reporting on its own, which is the only way to see which one is carrying the others.

Rostering into payroll Timesheets pushed straight into Xero payroll rather than retyped, with the transcription errors and leave arguments that follow.

BAS without the scramble A file that is already reconciled when the quarter closes, so the activity statement is a review rather than a rebuild.

If any of that sounds like your week, it is worth a conversation.

Who it suits

Who this is for

Cafes and hospitality Daily takings, surcharges and a roster that moves every week. Shops and retail Counter sales that have to reconcile against the deposit. Stripe as well Where the website and the terminal both have to reach Xero. Custom integrations What one looks like when a platform's own payment processing stopped matching the coding.

Questions we answer every week

Questions we are asked most

Does Square integrate with Xero? Yes, and the connection is the easy part. What decides whether it helps is the mapping: whether takings, fees, surcharges and refunds land in the right accounts, and whether the settlement reconciles against the bank. Switched on without that, it produces a great deal of tidy data that does not agree with your bank. And where the mapping cannot get there, because the coding your reporting needs is beyond what the connector carries, we build the connection that can.

We run more than one register. Can they be kept separate? Yes, and they should be. Kept apart you can see which location or register is actually paying its way. Merged into one income account you are looking at an average, which is the number least likely to tell you anything useful.

What about GST on Square's 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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