Xero General Ledger Interface

Thursday, 14 March 2019 by John Rickard

finPOWER Connect now directly integrates to Xero's web based Accounting application.

This means your Bank Transactions and Manual Journals can be posted directly into your Xero organisation.

Overview

From version 3.01.11, finPOWER Connect supports a direct interface to Xero using Xero's web based API.

To use the Xero General Ledger interface you must be licensed for the Accounting Interface Add-On.

A simple click or two of the mouse can transfer all your Bank Transactions and Journal Entries to Xero, no more exporting and importing of files.

The New General Ledger Interface

One of the key decisions we made when updating our General Ledger interface was to rewrite the code to better support future interfaces; both built-in and customised interfaces.

So, because this was such a major change, we left the current General Ledger interface intact, and built a new interface; therefore you must specifically turn on the new interface to use it.

Under Tools, Global Settings, General group, GL and Accounting page you can turn on the new interface by checking the "Use new Interface (BETA)?" option.

Global Settings, GL and Accounting

The new General Ledger interface introduces two major components:

  1. Integration to Xero via their Web API.
  2. A new set of Business Layer objects and functionality to work with transactions being exported from finPOWER Connect.
    • For more information see 15935.

Other changes include:

  1. New option to group or send Bank Transactions individually for Direct Credit and Debit batches.
    • For more information see 15933.
  2. Added "Accounting Interface request" to Audit Search.

When building the finPOWER Connect interface to Xero we focused on keeping it as simple as possible. Therefore all information to be transferred is assembled first, then thoroughly validated before any transactions are committed to Xero. This way, any potential problems are identified first, rather than committing some transactions and then finding errors part way through the process.

The new General Ledger interface is BETA release only. Therefore, use with caution and either test before using in production or carefully review the Transactions created in your General Ledger system.