Xero Reports – The Ultimate Xero Reporting Guide for You

The system of Xero reporting is vast and covers 50+ versatile reports available to you with a few clicks. You can apply different formats, change data range, select compare periods and even create reusable custom report layouts. Read this tutorial to discover the reporting capabilities in Xero and beyond this tool.

Xero reports explained

Reports in Xero are the templates of aggregated data. You don’t have to create reports in Xero because they are already available for you. To find them, go to the Accounting menu and select Reports.

You will see a number of templates grouped by the following categories:

• Financial 
• Sales
• Tax
• Purchases
• Accounting
• Inventory
• Fixed assets
• Payrun

You can export, print, save as drafts and publish reports as read-only snapshots. 

Different categories of Xero reports for different countries

The reports categories we introduced above work for organizations from the UK, France, Ukraine, and other countries. For the US-based organizations, Xero groups reports in the following categories:

• Financial performance
• Financial statements
• Payables and receivables
• Payroll
• Projects
• Reconciliations
• Taxes and balances
• Transactions

And here is how it looks:  

With this view, you will only see the newer versions of the reports if applicable. However, you can still access the older versions by clicking the three-dots menu and then selecting “View an older version of this report”:

This tutorial will rest on the UK-based version of the Reports categorization, e.g., Financial, Sales, etc. However, it’s not necessary to find the required reports manually – you can simply enter the report name in the search bar and get the result. Moreover, you’ll be offered both the newer and older versions to choose from.

Xero new reports

You can see that some reports have the label New. 

These are either the updated versions of some reports or the new reports available. Unlike the regular versions, the new ones provide more flexible settings and layouts. For example, here is how the new version of the Balance Sheet looks compared to the old version.

So far, the list of the new reports include:

Read more

• Balance Sheet
• Movements in Equity
• Profit and Loss
• Statement of Cash Flows – Direct Method
• Aged Receivables Detail
• Aged Receivables Summary
• Receivable Invoice Detail
• Receivable Invoice Summary
• Aged Payables Detail
• Aged Payables Summary
• Payable Invoice Detail
• Payable Invoice Summary
• Expense Claim Detail
• Billable Expenses – Outstanding
• Account Transactions
• Cash Validation Customer Report
• Contact Transactions – Summary
• Duplicate Statement Lines
• Trial Balance
• Inventory Item Details
• Inventory Item List
• Inventory Item Summary
• Project Financials
• Depreciation Schedule
• Disposal Schedule
• Fixed Asset Reconciliation

Xero reports not working

The most common Xero users’ requests regarding the Xero reports failure are “reports not showing,” “reports not loading,” “reports function not working,” and so on. Clearing cache is considered the most popular solution to fix this. But it does not help every time. 

We can’t say it’s a frequent occurrence, but it’s a risk, which you can mitigate. How? 

Xero reports export and backup

In the blog post about Xero Backup, we explained how you could export Xero data to Excel, Google Sheets, BigQuery, or Looker Studio on a schedule. This will let you have a backup copy of your Xero reports. To implement the backup on a schedule, you need to sign up to Coupler.io, click Add new importer, select Xero Reports as a source app and choose the desired destination app.

After that, set up the following parameters:

• Source – Connect to your Xero account and configure the report to export.
• Destination – Select the destination file or table to load data to. In addition to Google Sheets, you can export Xero to Excel or even integrate Xero in Google BigQuery. 
• Schedule – Enable the Automatic data refresh and schedule reports every 15 minutes, every Tuesday, or at another custom frequency. 

Here is what an importer may look like:

And here is an example of a Balance Sheet exported from Xero to Google Sheets:

With Coupler.io, you can export the following Xero reports:

• Aged Payables by Contact
• Aged Receivables by Contact
• Balance Sheet
• Bank Statement
• Bank Summary
• Budget Summary
• Executive Summary
• Profit and Loss
• Trial Balance

Read more on exporting reports from Xero to Google Sheets.

Now let’s go through the main groups of reports in Xero and check out some interesting details.

Xero Financial reports

The following reports are meant to help you understand your organization’s financial position and examine performance:

Report	Description
Balance Sheet	Displays the financial position of your organization and what you own and owe at a particular time.  You can export this report with Coupler.io.
Balance Sheet (New)	The newer version of the Balance Sheet report.
Budget Manager	Allows you to create budgets to monitor business performance against your goals.
Budget Summary	Displays the budgets that you’ve created in the Budget Manager report. You can export this report with Coupler.io.
Budget Variance	Allows you to compare your actual figures with budgeted ones to track business performance.
Business Performance	Displays the business performance using a range of ratios and graphs.
Cash Summary	Displays the movement of cash in and out of your organization for a selected period.
Executive Summary	Displays an overview of key cash, profitability, balance sheet, income, performance, and position items. You can export this report with Coupler.io.
Movements in Equity	Displays the change in your organization’s net worth over the financial year.
Movements in Equity (New)	The newer version of the Movements in Equity report.
Profit and Loss	Displays your organization’s income, expenses, and profit for a selected period. You can export this report with Coupler.io.
Profit and Loss (New)	The newer version of the Profit and Loss report.
Statement of Cash Flows – Direct Method (New)	Displays how your business has received and used cash within a specific time frame.
Tracking Summary	Allows you to generate a list of your tracking options showing activity in a particular group of accounts for a selected period.

Xero Sales reports

The sales reports are meant to see the transactions you’ve had between your suppliers and your customers. Here is what Xero offers for this:

Report	Description
Aged Receivables	Displays the amounts your customers owe and how long they’re overdue. You can export this report with Coupler.io.
Aged Receivables Summary (New)	The newer version of the Aged Receivables report.
Aged Receivables Detail (New)	Displays the information on outstanding invoices, credit notes, and over payments and how long they’re overdue.
Receivable Invoice Detail (New)	Displays line-by-line details of all customer invoices, credit notes, and over payments for a selected period.
Receivable Invoice Summary (New)	Displays the list of invoices, credit notes, and over payments entered for a selected period.
Customer Invoice Report	Displays the list of invoices, including foreign currency invoices, credit notes, and over payments for your customers.

Xero Tax reports

Xero offers the Sales Tax Report for you to review your sales tax details. You can use only one sales tax account for your Xero Sales Tax Report. 

This report itself consists of two tabs: 

• Sales Tax Summary – Displays a summary of taxes. You can filter the information by Tax Rate, Tax Component, and Account type.
• Sales Tax Audit – Displays the grouped sales tax transactions for the return period.

Once you’ve reviewed the Sales Tax Summary and the Sales Tax Audit report or submitted your tax return, you can publish the report.

Purchases and other Xero expense reports

The purchases reports in Xero contain information about the payments, purchase orders, bills, and expense claims between your suppliers and customers. 

Report	Description
Aged Payables	Displays the amounts you owe to your suppliers or for expense claims and if they’re overdue. You can export this report with Coupler.io.
Aged Payables Summary (New)	The newer version of the Aged Payables report.
Aged Payables Detail (New)	Displays the information on individual bills, credit notes, and over payments owed and how long they are overdue.
Billable Expenses – Outstanding (New)	Displays outstanding items you’ve assigned as billable to customers.
Expense Claim Detail (New)	Displays individual expense claims and how long they are overdue.
Payable Invoice Detail (New)	Displays line-by-line details of bills, credit notes, over payments, and prepayments for a selected period.
Payable Invoice Summary (New)	Displays invoices, credit notes, over payments, and prepayments for a selected period.
Supplier Invoice Report	The older version of the Payable Invoice Summary (New)

Xero reports for accountant

The accounting section of reports in Xero is the longest. It counts 16 reports that display transaction details, actual bank balances, monthly account summaries, and information to help with reconciling. 

Report	Description
Account Summary	Displays a monthly summary for a selected account.
Account Transactions	Displays the details of transactions for a selected account.
Account Transactions (New)	The newer version of the Account Transactions report.
Bank Reconciliation Summary	Displays the missing, deleted, or duplicated transactions if your actual bank balance and the bank account balance do not match.
Bank Summary	Displays money coming in and out of your bank accounts for a selected period. You can export this report with Coupler.io.
Blank Report (New)	Use it to create your own report from scratch.
Cash Validation Customer Report (New)	Provides a summary of validation criteria against account transactions in your organization. The report is meant to ensure confidence to lenders that your accounting information is valid and accurate.
Contact Transactions – Summary (New)	Displays a summary of contact’s receivable, payable, and cash transactions for a selected period.
Detailed Account Transactions	Displays a list of transactions for a selected period.
Duplicate Statement Lines (New)	Displays duplicate statements lines, so you can compare them to your actual bank statement and remove them if necessary.
Foreign Currency Gains and Losses	Displays balances revalued in your base currency and your total foreign currency exposure for each currency.
General Ledger	Displays all transactions from all accounts for a selected period.
Income and Expenses by Contact	Displays incurred expenses and received income or funds by contact.
Journal Report	Displays the entries made in your general ledger (chart of accounts) when transactions are approved.
Trial Balance	Displays your general ledger account balances at a selected date. You can export this report with Coupler.io.
Trial Balance (New)	The newer version of the Trial Balance report.

Xero Inventory reports

Xero offers a few reports that allow you to see the information about your inventory items, including the sales and purchase details for both tracked and untracked items. 

Report	Description
Inventory Item Details (New)	Displays quantities on hand and changes to the value of your tracked inventory.
Inventory Item List (New)	Displays a complete list of your inventory items, including quantity and value on hand for tracked items.
Inventory Item Summary	Displays a summary of purchases and sales over a selected period.
Inventory Item Summary (New)	The newer version of the Inventory Item Summary report.
Sales by Item report	Displays sales transactions of untracked inventory items.

Xero Payroll reports 

Important: The options for Payroll reports may differ depending on the country of your organization. 

Payroll reports in Xero allow you to see information about payroll activity, transactions, leave balances, time sheets, remuneration, and pension. You will find them in the Payrun section:

Report	Description
Pay Run by Employee	Displays the amounts paid to either an individual or all employees.
Pay Run by Pay Item	Displays the amounts paid, as well as the payment type and account for each pay item.
Pay Run by Pay Type	Displays the amounts paid or individual pay runs by pay type.
Pay Run Summary	Displays each payment type processed in a pay run.

Note: Make sure that you have payroll admin access to use pay run reports in Xero.

Xero Fixed Assets reports

Fixed assets reports in Xero allow you to see the information about your fixed assets, their movements and compare fixed balances between fixed assets register and balance sheet.

Report	Description
Depreciation Schedule	Displays fixed assets, movements, and depreciation values.
Depreciation Schedule (New)	The newer version of the Depreciation Schedule report.
Disposal Schedule	Displays information about fixed assets that were sold or disposed of within the selected period.
Fixed Asset Reconciliation	Displays opening and closing balances, as well as debit and credit movements. The report is meant to reconcile your balance sheet and fixed asset register.
Fixed Asset Reconciliation (New)	The newer version of the Fixed Asset Reconciliation report.

We’re done with the preset reports you can use in Xero. Meanwhile, you can customize some of these for your needs and create reusable layouts. Let’s see how it works in Xero.

Xero custom reports

You can create a custom report from scratch using the Blank Report (Accounting section). 

Another option is to change the layout of an existing report. Xero provides a layout editor tool for this. However, it is available only for newer versions of financial reports. For now, these are:

• Balance Sheet 
• Movements in Equity
• Profit and Loss
• Statement of Cash Flows – Direct Method

For customization, you can: 

• Add/remove/sort/reorder fields
• Add/edit formulas
• Create/move groups of accounts

The reports you’ve edited and saved will be available in the Custom tab of the Reports menu. Let’s check it out in practice in the example of a Xero Profit and Loss report.

Xero create reports with a custom layout

Open the P&L report, find the Edit layout button in the bottom left corner, and click on it.

Now you can start editing your layout.

For this example, we made a few changes to the layout:

• Renamed the report from Profit and Loss to P&L
• Edited the date range from Nov 2021 to 1 Nov – 30 Nov 2021 
• Renamed Cost of Sales to Sales Cost
• Relocated the Trading Income row to the bottom 

When you’re done making changes, click Done.

But that’s not all. Now you need to save your layout as custom. For this, click Save as and select Custom.

Name your custom report, and you can optionally make it the default. From now on, it’s available in the Custom tab.

Xero custom reports not working

If you can’t see your custom reports, try to clear the cache as we suggested above. On the other hand, it’s better to make sure you have a self-updating backup copy of your custom Xero report outside of Xero. In the section Xero reports export and backup, we explained how you can automate exports of preset Xero reports with Coupler.io. Unfortunately, Coupler.io does not export reports with custom layouts, but it’s not an issue!

You can build your custom report in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel using the raw data exported from Xero. For this, you need to:

• Sign up to Coupler.io, click Add new importer, select Xero (not Xero Reports) as a source app and choose the desired destination app.

• The rest of the flow you already know:
• Connect to your Xero account and select the data entity to export.
• Select the destination file or table to load data to. 
• Configure the schedule for data exports if you need automatic data refresh.

Making a custom Xero report in a spreadsheet will let you avoid any troubles in case of any issues on Xero’s side.

Advanced reports with Xero

In the Accounting menu, you can see the Advanced tab.

It does not in any way relate to advanced reporting, and the reports you can see there are the same as in the Report tab. However, if you are interested in advanced reporting tools, you can check out Xero App Store. Here you will find a bunch of apps to satisfy your reporting needs and purposes.

Xero reports grouped by your requests

Above we introduced the categories of reports according to Xero. Xero users, however, may have their own vision or way of grouping reports. For example, you may want a separate category for Project reports. Let’s fix this and cover some of the most in-demand requests.

Budget reports in Xero

You have three Xero budget reports: Budget Manager, Budget Summary, and Budget Variance.

Budget Manager

You can only have one overall budget per organization. With the Budget Manager report, you can set up additional budgets in Xero. For this, you need to go to the Select Budget drop-down and click Add new budget.

Then you need to enter a name for your budget and select the region. Click Save.

Now you can fill out the budgeted amounts in your new budget. Alternatively, you can import a budget as a CSV, Excel, or ODS file by clicking on the Import button and following the instructions. 

Budget Summary

The Budget Summary report allows you to see a summarised view of any of your budgets. You can select:

• An additional budget that you’ve set up in the Budget Manager.
• The month to start from.
• The period – how many months at a time (1, 2, 3, 6, or 12) that you want to display in each column.
• The number of periods to show – 1 to 12.

Click Update to enable your configuration.

Note: You can automate the export of the Budget Summary report to Google Sheets, Excel, or BigQuery using Coupler.io with a few clicks. We explained this in the Xero reports export and backup section.

Budget Variance

The Budget Variance report allows you to see the comparison between the actual figures against budgeted amounts for the current month and year to date (YTD). The variances are shown as values and percentages.

You can configure the report as follows:

• Choose formats (current financial year, compare regions, YTD progress, etc.)
• Choose periods to compare 
• Choose the date range

Xero project reports

Xero offers two reports to get and insights into the time spent on projects and a summary of the project financials:

• Project Detailed Time report
• Project Summary report

To access each of these reports, you’ll need to go to the Projects menu. 

Project Detailed Time

To open a Project Detailed Time report, click Staff time overview and then Go to report.

Here is your Detailed Time report:

Project Summary 

To open a Project Summary report, click All projects and then Project Summary Report.

Here is what it looks like:

Xero income statement report

The income statement report in Xero is represented by the Profit and Loss report (new and old versions). It allows you to see income, expenses, and profit for a reporting period of your organization.

Here is a view of the older P&L version, which you can export with Coupler.io:

This is the Profit and Loss report with a new design:

Whichever version you work with, you can use the following settings for your P&L report:

• Common formats – you can choose from a range of common preset formats to customise your P&L report:
  • Current and previous 3 months
  • Current financial year by month
  • Month to date comparison
  • Year to date comparison
  • Compare кegion
• Date range – you can specify the date range for your P&L report.
• Comparison period – you can choose the number of comparison periods.
• Filter by tracking – you can filter your report results by tracking category if applicable, for example, by Region.
• Accounting basis – you can select the accounting basis for your P&L report:
  • Accrual – revenue earned and expenses incurred during the report date range.
  • Cash – revenue received and expenses paid during the report date range.
• Display settings – you can select additional columns and display settings for your P&L report:
  • Accounting basis
  • Account codes
  • Decimals
  • Percentage of trading income
  • Total
  • Year to date

Xero tracking reports

Xero offers a Tracking Summary report that generates a list of your tracking options. Each of the options displays activity in a particular group of accounts for a specific time period.

To launch a Tracking Summary report, you must select an account group. These are the account types from your chart of accounts, for example, Expenses. You can also configure the date range and choose a tracking category. Click Update and voila.

The report will display the transactions assigned to the selected account group. The transactions assigned to the selected account group that were not tracked are displayed as Unassigned.

For each category option, you’ll see the opening and closing balances according to the specified date range. The net activity displays the outcome of all approved transactions except for purchase orders and quotes.

Xero user activity reports

If you need to see history notes or a user activity log, you need the History and Notes report. It displays information about all changes made to your transactions and which user made them. 

Go to Accounting => Advanced and find History and notes.

Yeah, it’s that simple.

Xero income reports

Some time ago, Xero offered two separate reports: Income by Contact and Expenses by Contact. Now, you have one report that consolidates both of these – Income and Expenses by Contact. It displays incurred expenses and received income by a particular contact.

Xero management reports

Xero does not provide any dedicated management reports, but the following ones are usually considered the management report pack:

• Executive Summary: overview of key cash, profitability, balance sheet, income, performance, and position items.
• Cash Summary: movement of cash in and out of your organization for a selected period.
• Profit and Loss: income, expenses, and profit for a selected period
• Balance Sheet: financial position of your organization and what you own and owe at a particular time.
• Aged Receivables: amounts your customers owe and how long they’re overdue.
• Aged Payables: amounts you owe to your suppliers or for expense claims, and if they’re overdue.

All of these, except for the Cash Summary report, you can automatically export from Xero to Excel, Google Sheets, or BigQuery on a custom schedule with Coupler.io.

Graph reports in Xero

Many Xero users thought that it would be great to have graphs in their reports. Xero listened to this request and released two real-time dashboards: Business Snapshot and Short Term Cash Flow. You will find both features in the Business menu:

Business Snapshot – a dashboard with valuable information about your organization’s financial health, such as profitability, income and expenses. 

Short Term Cash Flow – a dashboard showing a projection of the amount of cash in the next periods. 

The advanced versions of both dashboards are available in Xero Analytics Plus:

Business Snapshot	Short Term Cash Flow
– Custom date ranges – Option to choose accounts to include – Option to choose expenses to track – Option to drill down into a metric on the dashboard to see the underlying transactions	– Projection periods for the next 7, 30, 60, or 90 days – Predicted recurring cash transactions – Option to manually add one-off amounts to the dashboard to see the impact on cash flow

Quarterly reports Xero

All new reports in Xero allow you to apply a quarterly-based date range:

• This quarter
• Last quarter
• Quarter to date

 For example, here is how it looks in the Duplicate Statement Lines report.

Check out the Xero new reports section to learn the list of new reports.

Consolidated Xero reports

Xero does not provide consolidated statements natively, so you’ll need to opt for a third-party solution. In the Xero App Store, there are many tools for making consolidated reports including Fathom, joiin, Spotlight Reporting, etc.

Choose the best one for your needs.

Xero reporting – summary

It seems that Xero, with its abundance of reporting options, can satisfy the needs of all users. However, the lack of consolidation and customization features often causes users to opt for third-party solutions to power up their reporting. If you feel the same and want to go beyond the Xero reporting capabilities, check out Coupler.io or another tool that meets your needs. Good luck with your data!

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