The Loc8 to Xero integration gives you the opportunity to create invoices from your Loc8 account and send out those invoices from within your Xero account to customers through Xero's invoicing lifecycle without having any need to duplicating your company's financial data in Xero such as tax rates and Chart of Accounts or any of your customer contacts.
You can instantly notice your jobs getting invoiced faster, giving you the opportunity to increase your cash flow with insights into profits per work order, invoice status, payments due and payments received.
In this article, we will see:
Enabling the Loc8 to Xero Integration
To establish a connection between Loc8 and Xero, you will first turn on the integration from Settings -> Integrations and define a few configurations that'll determine how the financial data will be synchronised between the two systems.
To do so, see the steps mentioned in the article, Enable Integration between Loc8 and a Supported External App.
Once the integration is established, it will remain so even if you log out from either of your accounts, unless you choose to manually remove the Xero app from the Integrations area.
How will you know if the integration is active at anytime
Go to the Integrations area and check if the Xero app is added and is in Active state.
You will also see that the timestamp against the Last success poll matches closely to your system's UTC clock. This is a positive indication that the integration is running its periodic checks to ensure the required data is up-to-date on both the systems.
What happens in Loc8 upon integration
You will notice two important changes in your Loc8 account that's relevant to invoicing:
All of your existing tax types are replaced by the tax types and corresponding tax rates defined in Xero. To view the new tax types, go to Settings -> Company and scroll down to the Financial section.
The customers created in Loc8 are now available in Xero and any existing or new customers in Xero are also added to the customer list in Loc8.
What initiates a Loc8 invoice to appear in Xero
While the integration is active, any invoice created in Loc8 (after the integration was enabled) will be available in Xero, but only on the condition that you manually change the status of the invoice from Draft to Pending Payment.
Wait for a moment for the integration to pick up the new invoice and sync with Xero. Meanwhile, open your Xero account and go to the Invoices section. In the example of a Xero account below, we will access the invoices through Business -> Invoices.
Soon you will find the new invoice in Xero, intact with its Invoice ID, customer name, payment amount, etc.
You can now continue with sending the invoice to the customer as per your usual process in Xero.
Invoice Status in Loc8 during integration
While Xero has its own invoice lifecycle where:
you Approve the invoice, after which the invoice is sent to the customer
on receiving a payment you record the amount against a Chart of Account
And, that sets the invoice status in Xero to Paid.
In Loc8, the invoice will directly progress from Pending Payment to Paid status as soon as the integration synchronises the financial data from the time the Invoice was Paid in Xero.
Track the integration activities in History Log
Any changes that are being made while the integration is active, is constantly logged in History. The detailed logs also prove to be an excellent tool for troubleshooting any sync issues.
To access the History, go to Settings -> Integrations and open the app information.
This covers all of the important aspects associated with Loc8 to Xero integration.