Xero Bill Export
Xero Bill Export is the money you pay out: the invoices your subcontractors send you, checked against what their contracted rates say the work should have cost, then pushed into Xero as draft bills for approval and payment.
It’s the exact mirror of Xero Invoice Export. One is what your customers owe you; this is what you owe your suppliers. They sit next to each other under Data & Integrations › Export Data because they’re the two halves of the same month.
This screen carries supplier cost and margin, so it’s restricted to roles with rate permission (admin, owner or finance). If it isn’t in your menu, that’s why.
Where bills come from
You don’t create a bill here. Each one is a supplier invoice you already brought in through Import 3PT Data — one committed batch becomes one bill. This screen is the step after: check it, sign it off, pay it.
The screen opens on the last complete calendar month, with This month and Last month quick ranges, and an All bills option that ignores the period entirely. That last one matters: the register is the only way into a bill, so anything older than last month would otherwise be out of reach.
The register
The main grid is a drill, three levels deep:
Subcontractor → Bill → charge line.
Click a subcontractor to see their invoices for the period, and a bill to see the individual charge lines that make it up — date, site, stream, container, description, quantity, unit rate and amount, exactly as Xero will receive them. Nothing is summarised or blended; a line on screen is a line on the bill.
The columns are grouped into bands:
| Band | Columns | What they tell you |
|---|---|---|
| Subcontractor | Subcontractor ID | WastePro’s own id for the supplier — quote it if a bill has landed against the wrong one. |
| Bill | Bill Number, Bill Date, Charge Lines, Bill Total, Bill Attachment in WastePro | The supplier’s invoice number as read from their file, the billing period’s month end, how many lines, the modelled total, and whether their original invoice file is held against the batch. |
| Charge line | Qty, Unit Rate | The line’s true quantity — lifts, tonnes or occurrences depending on the charge code — and what the supplier charged per unit. |
| Xero | Xero Push Status, Xero Bill ID, Xero Status | Whether a bill is in Xero right now, the id Xero returned, and the bill’s live status there. |
Bill Attachment in WastePro showing Not Included means the bill would reach Xero with no source document behind it. You can attach the supplier’s own invoice file to a bill that was imported without one.
The cost matrix
Under the register sits a month-by-month matrix of the last twelve complete months plus this one, one measure at a time: billed cost, quantity, volume (m³), charge lines, or share of billed cost. It’s for spotting the month where a supplier’s cost stepped up.
Reconcile before you pay
This is the point of the screen. Open a bill and the Checks before export panel puts several comparisons side by side.
| Check | What it compares |
|---|---|
| Invoice total | The supplier’s own stated total against the calculated sum of their lines. Catches a line the reader skipped, or one they got wrong. |
| Scheduled rate | What their contracted buy rate × quantity says the work should have cost, against what they actually billed. This is the commercial check. |
| Rate card gaps | Lines with no contracted buy rate at all — nothing to compare them against, so they sit outside the check above. |
| Quantity and Cubic metres | What you invoiced the customer for against what the supplier billed you. A wide gap means you’re paying for work you never invoiced, or invoicing work nobody billed you for. |
| Margin | Revenue minus cost on this bill, in dollars and as a percentage. |
The margin figure is gross priced work — before billing exclusions, holds and manual adjustments. It’s a health check, not the final number, and the panel says how many of the bill’s jobs are actually priced so you can judge how much weight to put on it.
The difference between stated and contracted is the whole game. A supplier who quietly slips a few extra charges onto a month produces a total that looks plausibly high — not obviously wrong, just a bit more than last time. Comparing against contract is what turns that into something you can see.
Sending to Xero
Create draft Bills in Xero creates each selected bill as a draft ACCPAY bill in that organisation’s Xero. Nothing is approved and nothing is paid — approval and payment stay in Xero, with your normal controls. There’s also Export Xero CSV if you’d rather import them yourself.
A bill won’t go through until it passes every one of these:
| The bill must… | Why |
|---|---|
| Have its supplier invoice total captured | Without it, nothing has been compared to anything — the bill would be paid off your own model. |
| Be within reconcile tolerance | A variance you haven’t understood is exactly what shouldn’t go through on autopilot. |
| Carry the supplier’s invoice number | Xero uses it as the duplicate-payment guard. |
| Have at least one charge line | |
| Have every line coded to a GL expense account | Xero needs to know what the cost is against. |
| Have been read completely | A partially-read invoice would post as an incomplete bill. |
The whole selection is validated before anything is sent, so a bad bill fails the check rather than half-pushing real documents into your accounts. Bills already in Xero are skipped rather than sent again.
The double-pay protection. Bills are pushed under the supplier’s own invoice number. If that number already exists in Xero — because you pushed it before, or someone entered it by hand — the push fails loudly for that bill rather than quietly updating the existing one. Read a failure like that as the system doing its job.
A bill deleted in Xero can be sent again
Deleting a draft in Xero is a normal correction — wrong period, wrong supplier, priced off a mapping that’s since been fixed. WastePro re-checks with Xero before it blocks anything: if the bill has been deleted or voided there, the push status goes back to Not Pushed and it can be sent again. The Xero Bill ID and Status columns still show what happened to the old one, so the history isn’t lost.
If Xero can’t be reached, WastePro assumes the bill is still there rather than sending it again. A bill you have to re-push later is a much cheaper mistake than one that gets paid twice.
Why the amounts look the way they do in Xero
Each line arrives in Xero as a quantity of 1 at the reviewed line amount, with the real quantity and unit price written into the description.
That looks odd until you know why: Xero recalculates quantity × unit price itself, and for rates carried to fractions of a cent — per-tonne charges especially — that recalculation drifts a few cents from the total you reviewed. Posting the reviewed amount directly means the bill in Xero is always exactly the bill you signed off.
Next: Xero Invoice Export is the other half of the month — what your customers owe you.