From signed proposal to draft Xero invoices

There is a gap in most firms that nobody owns. The client has signed. So who raises the invoice?

The proposal goes out, the client signs, everyone is pleased. And then somebody has to sit down and re-key the whole thing into Xero. Set up the contact. Raise the one-off invoice for the year-end alignment fee and the company formation. Build a repeating invoice for the monthly fee. Get the direct debit pointed at it.

It is twenty minutes of work if you know what you are doing. The problem is not the twenty minutes. The problem is that it happens days later, by somebody who was not on the call, working from a PDF. That is where the alignment fee quietly goes missing, where the monthly starts a month late, and where the fee you agreed stops matching the fee you actually bill.

Our Xero connection closes that gap. This is exactly what it does.

When a client signs, three things appear in your Xero

The moment the client puts their name to the proposal, Power Pricing creates:

The client as a Xero contact. Name, email and phone come straight off the proposal. The address arrives a little later, when the client completes your onboarding form, because that is when you actually learn it.

A draft invoice for the one-off fees. Everything payable on day one, itemised the way you priced it: company formation, cloud setup, prior year accounts, the year-end alignment fee, any catch-up.

A draft repeating invoice for the monthly fee. Set to the agreed amount, on a monthly cycle, starting from the service start date on the proposal.

No re-keying. No PDF open on somebody's second monitor. The figures in Xero are the figures the client agreed, because they came from the same place.

Drafts, not charges

Everything lands as a draft. Nothing is approved, nothing is sent, nothing is collected until you say so.

That is deliberate and it is not going to change. You are the one with the relationship and the professional obligations. A tool that starts billing your clients on your behalf the second a form is submitted is a tool you cannot fully trust, and you would be right not to.

Power Pricing never touches the money. No access to your bank, no cut of your fees, and it is not a payment processor. It writes invoices into your Xero and stops there.

Your existing Xero setup collects the direct debit exactly as it does today. If you point the repeating invoice at the branding theme you have already connected to your direct debit provider, collection simply happens.

Two things are in the pipeline behind this. We are building the step that lets the client set up the direct debit as part of signing, rather than you chasing a mandate afterwards, and it will work with GoCardless or Adfin, on your own account with whichever of them you already use. The mandate is set up on your account, the money goes to you, and Power Pricing takes nothing. Neither is switched on for firms yet. When they are, this is the paragraph that changes.

One line, or every line

Firms bill the monthly fee differently, so there is a choice.

One bundled line gives the client a single monthly accountancy fees figure. It is the default, and most firms want it. You sold a package, so the invoice should look like a package.

Itemised puts each service on its own line at its own monthly fee. Firms arriving from a world of timesheets and line items often want this, at least at first, and some want it permanently because their clients expect the detail.

And now, every account

The newest addition, and the reason for writing this: you can send each service to its own account code in your chart of accounts.

This came from a firm halfway through switching from another proposal tool. They had already unbundled their sales invoices, and they bill software subscriptions at a set amount every month. That is a recharge rather than fee income, and it wants its own account. Under the old behaviour every line went to one sales account, and their management accounts were the poorer for it.

Now, in Settings, on your Xero card, there is an account per service section. Leave everything on the default and nothing changes. Or send bookkeeping to one account, software recharges to another, and payroll to a third. It works on the monthly invoice and the one-off invoice, and it works for services you have created yourself, not only the ones we ship with.

Two details worth knowing, because they are the ones people ask about:

• An alignment fee follows its own service. If you map annual accounts to a particular account, the alignment fee for annual accounts goes there too. It is that service's fee, billed to catch up the months already elapsed. It does not get dropped into a general one-off account.
• Catch-up fees and any discount line stay on your default account. Those belong to the engagement as a whole rather than to any one service, and the invoice total has to match the fee the client signed to the penny. Splitting them would put that at risk for no real gain.

Your account list is read from your real Xero chart, so you pick from the accounts you actually have. If a code you mapped is later archived in Xero, that line falls back to your default for that invoice rather than failing, and we say so on screen so you can put it right.

What it does not do

Being straight about the edges, because you will find them anyway:

• It does not approve or send invoices. Drafts only, always.
• It does not collect payment. Your Xero and your own direct debit provider do that, and that stays true when the GoCardless and Adfin steps arrive.
• Three-option proposals bill as one bundled line. When you sell three options, the client chooses a package at a package price and never sees a per-service breakdown. Putting one on the invoice would undo the whole point of offering the options.
• For a group of companies, invoices go to the lead company, with each line labelled by the company it relates to. Separate invoices per entity is not there yet.
• It syncs on signature, not continuously. Change a fee in Xero afterwards and Power Pricing does not know. Change it in Power Pricing and you want a new proposal anyway, which is the honest way to reprice a client.

Getting it switched on

The Xero connection is in early access rather than on general release, and that is a deliberate limit rather than a marketing device. Xero caps how many organisations an app can connect to before it completes certification, so we are turning firms on in a controlled way and watching each one.

If you want it, open Settings, go to Integrations, and click request early access on the Xero card. We will come back to you.

If you are already connected, the account per service mapping is live in your Settings now. It is optional, it is off until you touch it, and if you never open it your invoices carry on exactly as they do today.