If you wish to reconcile your Expend card transactions in Xero, there are three ways we can recommend doing this. All three ways are explained in this article.
It’s also useful to know the best way to reconcile a bank transfer to top up your Expend float account. This is explained at the end of the article.
Option 1: Reconcile with the Xero bank statement (recommended)
To help you reconcile your Expend account in Xero, we offer a bank feed integration. There are no special actions required to set it up; it starts working as soon as you connect Expend and Xero. It works just like other bank feeds you may have, so cleared transactions will be updated in Xero once a day (usually around 1am). A transaction is cleared when the merchant takes the money, which usually takes a day or two. If you don't see a recent transaction, it may be that it has not cleared yet.
The bank feed will appear in your Xero bank statements after the first sync is complete. To view the bank statement in Xero, go to your Expend Account (under Bank Accounts) and click Bank statements. Any unreconciled transactions on the bank statement will be available on the Reconcile tab, so you can immediately reconcile them as they become available.
Please note the following:
The bank feed integration became available on 9/5/2019, so only transactions from this date are included in the bank feed. Transactions before this date should be reconciled by exporting a CSV statement in the Xero format up to this date, then importing it to Xero. Please see the previous section for details.
The expense date may differ from the date on the bank feed by a day. This is because the date on the expense is the day the transaction happened, whereas the day on the statement is the day the merchant took the money.
The status of your bank feed is displayed at the top of your Xero integration page in the Expend web app. When it shows Enabled, everything should be working correctly. The bank feed is not supported when you are using a trial account and connect to the Demo Company. It will also be disabled if you've connected another bank feed to the Expend Account.
Note: If you have recently set up your integration and you don't see your transactions on the Reconcile or Bank statement tab in Xero, please contact our Customer Support team by clicking the chat button in the bottom right corner, or via the in-app chat on the mobile app.
Option 2: Reconcile with a CSV statement
You can reconcile your Expend card transactions by exporting them to a CSV file and uploading them to Xero as a bank statement. After you import the CSV file, transactions must be checked one by one and marked as reconciled.
To reconcile using a CSV statement, follow the steps below.
Step 1. Export an Expend statement
Start by downloading a CSV statement of your transactions from the Expend web app. The fields in the CSV file are ordered and formatted according to Xero’s requirements.
Sign in to the Expend web app at app.expend.io.
Open the sidebar menu, go to MANAGE, click Reporting, select Exports, and go to the Statement box.
Select a From and To date. All transactions between and including these dates will be exported. Clear the fields to include ALL transactions.
In the Format field, select Xero.
Click Download.
Please note: If you don’t see some recent transactions in the CSV file, it is because a transaction isn’t exported if it is not yet final. A transaction is only ‘final’ when the merchant has taken the funds. Once this has happened, it will be exported.
Step 2. Import the CSV file into Xero and reconcile
After exporting the CSV statement, import it into Xero and reconcile the transactions.
In Xero, go to Accounts > Bank Accounts and select the Expend account.
Click Manage Account, click Import a Statement, and select the file you exported from Expend.
Follow the steps as they are presented in Xero.
Option 3: Reconcile without a statement
If you use Expend’s Xero integration, every Expend card transaction is synced to Xero according to your sync settings. Transaction details are captured by Expend and synced directly without any intervention by another system or person. In this way, Expend avoids the mistakes that humans sometimes make when entering transaction and expense details.
We are confident that the transactions in Expend’s CSV statement will match the transactions on your Expend account in Xero, and once you feel confident of the same, you may find it easier and quicker to reconcile your Expend transactions without a statement. To do this, follow the steps below.
Step 1. Enable “Mark as Reconciled” in Xero
In Xero, go to Accounts > Bank Accounts and select the Expend account.
In the menu bar near the top of the page, click the question mark icon on the right.
Click Enable Mark as Reconciled. A button labelled More becomes available just above your transactions (next to the Remove & Redo button).
Step 2. Reconcile transactions
When “Mark as Reconciled” is enabled, you can reconcile transactions as follows:
Select one or more transactions by clicking the checkbox on the left. (Click the checkbox in the header row to select all transactions.)
Click the More button, and then click Mark as Reconciled.
Reconciling an Expend float account top-up
When you have topped up your Expend float account from another of your Xero bank accounts, such as your main business bank account, what is the best way to reconcile that transaction? During reconciliation, it may seem logical to create a “transfer between bank accounts” transaction, but instead, we recommend creating a “spend or receive money” transaction.
Why is this?
When a bank transfer arrives, we can’t tell what bank account it came from. It could be the account from which you normally top up Expend, or you could have received a bank transfer from somewhere else. For this reason, we handle these bank transfers by assigning them to come from the Fund Control account you assigned during your Xero configuration. If you have reconciled your transfers to go into that account and find that the balance is still negative, you’ll know that you received money from elsewhere.
How to reconcile a bank transfer
Find the transaction on the Reconcile tab.
On the right of the transaction, in the “match” column, click Create.
In the What field, select your Fund Control account. This is the control account for keeping track of money loaded to your float account that you created and selected when setting up your Expend integration with Xero (see Set up your Expend integration with Xero, 2. Set control accounts).
Complete the other fields, ensuring that you’ll be able to identify the transaction.
Click OK to reconcile.
When you view your Fund Control account, there will be matching debit and credit transactions to balance the amount transferred / topped up.