What we see
Four Things That Are True of Almost Every File We Open
Different industries, different sizes, the same four findings. If you recognise more than one of these, the handbook below is organised so you can go straight to it.
An empty reconcile queue is not a reconciled account
Xero’s reconcile screen clears when every line has been matched to something. That is a data-entry milestone, not an accounting one. The account is reconciled when its balance agrees with the bank statement and every difference is a listed, explained item. The gap between those two states is where duplicates, missing transactions and guessed codings sit quietly for months. It is the single most common thing we find, and it is usually in files where somebody has been diligently clearing the queue every week. More on this.
The file was designed for a smaller company and never redesigned
A chart of accounts built for a one-entity business with four expense categories is still in place three years later, now carrying departments as account codes and a tracking category nobody applies consistently. Nothing broke, so nothing got revisited. The symptom is not an error. It is that reporting takes a week and nobody trusts the result. Most files described to us as broken are files that were correct for a business that no longer exists. More on this.
The expensive decisions were made in week one
Conversion date. Chart of accounts structure. Which two dimensions get the tracking categories. Whether a high-volume channel posts in detail or as a summary. Each of those takes ten minutes at setup and months to unwind later, because reversing them means recoding history and rebuilding the comparatives. Almost nobody is told this at the point of deciding, which is why we put the list on its own page. More on this.
The problem is rarely the software
When a file does not reconcile, the cause is almost never Xero and almost never the connected system. It is the step between them that a person has to perform: the journal that was skipped, the summary that never tied to the deposit, the clearing account nobody has emptied since the integration was switched on. Software fails loudly. Processes fail quietly, and the first symptom is a month that will not close. More on this.
