How to send monthly management accounts from Xero to directors and clients automatically
Most small companies don't need a 40-page board pack. They need a profit and loss, a balance sheet and maybe a couple of other reports, in the directors' inboxes on roughly the same day each month. Xero holds all the numbers but has no way to schedule and send them, so someone ends up doing it by hand. Here's what the manual process involves, and how to take it off your plate.
What goes in a basic management pack
- Profit and Loss for last month, ideally with comparison columns for the previous months so trend is visible.
- Balance Sheet as at the month end.
- Aged Receivables Summary and Aged Payables Summary, because directors usually have questions about who owes what.
- Bank Summary for a plain view of cash movement.
If budgets are loaded in Xero, a Budget Summary is a useful addition. Keep the pack short. Most directors will read three pages, not thirty.
The manual process in Xero
- Reconcile the bank accounts and post month-end journals first. No pack is better than a pack that gets corrected later.
- Go to Reports, then All reports, and open Profit and Loss. Set the date range to the month, tick the comparison option, choose how many previous periods to show, and decide cash or accrual basis. Click Update.
- Export to PDF. Repeat for the balance sheet and each other report.
- If you want one file, merge the PDFs yourself, or build an Excel workbook and paste each report onto its own sheet.
- Write the email, attach everything, check the attachments are for the right month, and send.
For one company this is about twenty minutes. The real cost is that it depends on one person remembering, and when that person is on holiday, the pack doesn't go out.
Cash or accrual
Pick one and stick to it. Accrual is the normal basis for management accounts because it matches income and costs to the period they belong to. Cash basis shows what actually moved through the bank. If directors are used to seeing a particular set of numbers, changing the basis will cause confusion that has nothing to do with the business.
When to send it
Schedule the send for after your usual month-end close, not on the 1st. If you reconcile by the 5th, send on the 6th or 7th. The pack reflects whatever is in Xero at the moment it runs, so sending early means sending provisional numbers.
Automating it with Reportpost
This is the job Reportpost was built for. You sign in with Xero (read-only access), then set up a monthly schedule:
- Choose the reports for the pack, and the period, for example last month.
- Add comparison columns, from 1 to 11 previous periods, on the profit and loss and balance sheet.
- Pick cash or accrual.
- Choose the day, hour and timezone. All the reports are combined into one PDF, or you get one Excel sheet per report or a CSV per report.
- Add the directors or the client as recipients, and set your own subject and message. Replies come back to you.
Send test mails a copy to you first, and Preview shows the pack on screen. After that, it runs every month without anyone touching it.
Sending to clients rather than directors
If you are an accountant or bookkeeper and the recipients are your clients, the same approach applies, with one schedule per client organisation. Our guide to automating month-end report packs for many Xero clients covers that setup.
What it doesn't do
It sends the standard Xero reports. It doesn't write commentary, build charts or consolidate multiple entities. If you want a covering note, put it in the message field of the schedule. If you need a narrative analysis, you will still write that yourself.
Pricing starts at $12 a month for one organisation, and there is a 14-day free trial with no card. Here's a sample pack.