How to Reallocate Bulk Payments in Xero

Ever run into a problem where you can't mass allocate payments to another account in Xero?

We did for a long time too.

With the introduction of LiveCA's NoCode Development team, we've now figured this out. 

Problem

In Xero, you can't search for a group of payments, then decide where each one should go. While Find/Recode is handy for bills, here are a list of items you can't search for in Find and Recode.

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Solution: 

Luckily, Xero has an API that allows you to not only search for records, you can also update them. Ergo (always wanted to use that in a sentence), we can slap a bunch of searches, conditions and apps together to make this work without being a super developer.

In this particular example, a prior accountant mapped Chargebee Stripe payments to the wrong account, so we had to move them to their respective CAD and USD stripe clearing accounts.

Here are the steps we took using Integromat to bulk reallocate payments in Xero: 

• Grab details about an account
• Make a custom API call to search payments matching some of that account info
• Segregate the data and add it to Airtable
• Take that data and extract some text from the payment details
• Call Stripe's API
• Update the Airtable data
• Delete the existing payment
• Make a path for USD and CAD payments
• Apply the payment
• Update Airtable (for fun) 

Video

Here's Mat Kennedy, our Product Manager of the NoCode Development team, with a walkthrough video.

The amount of times we've had to manually remove and then re-apply a payment over the last few years has been heartbreaking knowing this is possible. Now we can adjust a few conditions on this scenario and be done so much quicker.

If you're looking to solve a problem like this and are in the market for a new accounting firm in Canada, please reach out.