Create bills, invoices and recharges

Ask your assistant to prepare a sales invoice, a supplier bill, or a linked intercompany recharge. A recharge creates a draft sales invoice in the charging organisation and a draft supplier bill in the receiving organisation. xpnAI saves the proposal as an invoice plan so you can review the details and return to its results later through your assistant.

Before you start

Connect and select both Xero organisations in your Workspace. Your assistant connection needs the optional permission to create draft bills and sales invoices. Existing connections do not gain that permission automatically. Reconnect your assistant and select it. If Xero reports missing invoice access, reconnect Xero too.

Each organisation needs an active contact representing the other entity, suitable accounts and tax codes, and the currencies you want to use enabled in Xero. This workflow uses existing contacts. Create a missing contact in Xero first.

Maintain account and contact roles

Your assistant can look up confirmed assignments with get_accounting_roles, filtered by organisation, purpose and counterpart. Recharge plans can resolve the contacts and income/expense accounts from these roles. Deferral plans can resolve the balance account and use the source transaction’s revenue or expense account for recognition. Intercompany journals can validate both ends of a confirmed loan-account relationship.

Review the resolved objects in the proposal before approval. If you deliberately choose a different object, agree an override reason with your assistant; it is saved with the plan. A material change to a role requires the plan to be revised and approved again. Missing roles need an explicit selection or a confirmed assignment.

Once a deferral plan has saved its first journal, remaining batches retain the approved accounts even if Workspace roles change. The assistant still checks the live accounts, source data and lock dates before saving more journals.

Open Account & contact roles in the xpnAI navigation to view the roles recorded for your Workspace. Workspace administrators can select Add role, choose a contact or account, and select its organisation and role. Members can view the saved assignments.

Use Intercompany customer (AR) for the customer contact representing the receiving entity in the charging organisation. Use Intercompany supplier (AP) for the supplier contact representing the charging entity in the receiving organisation. Select the counterpart organisation on each mapping. The assistant uses these explicit selections instead of guessing from names.

For Intercompany loan, select the local asset or liability account, the counterpart organisation, and its matching account. This records one relationship covering both organisations. Loan balances and recharge income or expense serve different purposes; a loan account is not automatically the correct account for an invoice line.

You can also record recharge income, recharge expense or a custom purpose. Only one mapping per record kind, purpose, organisation and counterpart is allowed. Use Edit to correct that choice or Remove to remove it. These actions change Workspace guidance, not Xero records or existing drafts. Search within the organisation, contact and account selectors to find a record. Contact pages load automatically.

For deferred balances, choose record kind Account and role Revenue deferral or Expense deferral. Select the organisation and its deferral account. These assignments have no counterpart organisation or account.

If a contact or account is archived, renamed or disconnected in Xero, review the mapping. Its displayed name reflects the last saved selection. The assistant checks live records before creating drafts. A change to the contact selected for a recharge requires a revised proposal and fresh approval; editing notes alone does not.

Find candidates with AI

The button shows a spinner while the review runs. Discovery uses the configured default AI model. New installations include a default model; you do not need to visit an AI settings page before finding candidates. If it reports a missing default, unavailable provider or unsupported reasoning setting, contact your administrator to check the AI configuration, then try again.

Workspace administrators can select Find role candidates to ask AI to review accounts and contacts in the selected organisations. It considers all built-in roles, including intercompany contacts and loans, recharge income and expense, and revenue and expense deferrals. Account suggestions use the account name, class and type together. Contacts can be suggested regardless of Xero’s customer or supplier flags.

Discovery uses the accounts and contacts already synced to xpnAI. Sync recent changes before running it. For each organisation, xpnAI shortlists up to 20 active contacts using name fragments or similar-sounding names from the other selected organisations, plus names containing “inter” anywhere. AI reviews those candidates and makes the final role suggestions. The shortlist can miss unusual trading names; assign those roles manually. Only the shortlist is sent for review, even when the organisation has a large contact list.

Suggestions are saved with status Draft, with the reason in Notes. Existing assignments are preserved. Review each suggestion, use Edit to correct it, Confirm to make it available to accounting workflows, or Remove to delete it. Saving edits to a draft does not confirm it. Confirmation checks the current Xero records again.

Candidate notes explain why the role fits and what needs review. They can mention account class and type, without repeating the draft status, account code or account name.

Roles appear in separate tables for Intercompany loans, Intercompany contacts (bills / invoices) and Deferral accounts. Recharge accounts and custom roles have their own tables when present. Each table shows the columns relevant to those roles. Loan counterparts have separate organisation and account columns; deferrals have no counterpart columns.

Click a column heading to sort that table, and click it again to reverse the order. Other tables keep their own sort order. Row actions use a tick to confirm, a pencil to edit and a trash icon to remove. Hover over an action to see its label.

An intercompany loan role covers both organisations and their linked accounts. Add it once: the reverse direction is the same relationship, and your assistant can find it from either organisation. Customer and supplier contact roles remain separate because they serve different purposes.

Draft roles are not provided to your assistant as accounting guidance and do not affect existing invoice plans. Finding or confirming roles does not create or change records in Xero. If no suitable candidates are found, assign the roles manually.

View saved plans

Open Journal & invoice plans and expand a plan under Bills & invoices. The page shows the latest 100 bill/invoice plans, including proposals, cancelled plans and creation receipts. For a pair, inspect each document’s status separately. Created as DRAFT means that side exists in Xero; a failed or uncertain other side still needs attention through your assistant. Expanding the plan shows its dates, evidence, accounts, taxes and amounts in each document’s currency.

Prepare a recharge

For example:

Prepare an intercompany recharge for September shared IT costs. Australia charges New Zealand AUD 1,000, split between hosting and software. Create an invoice in Australia and a bill in New Zealand in NZD. Look up the exchange rate for 15 September 2026. Use reference IT-2026-09 and show me the contacts, accounts, taxes, currencies and amounts before creating drafts.

Your assistant searches for the customer contact in the charging organisation and the supplier contact in the receiving organisation. Confirm the exact contacts, especially where names are similar. Contacts can be used before Xero has classified them as a customer or supplier.

Choose the appropriate account, tax code and any tracking options for each line in each organisation. A recharge is not automatically tax-free. The plan accepts positive amounts excluding tax, with each charge represented as one line. Credit notes, discounts and tax-inclusive input are not supported by this workflow.

Choose currencies and rates

Both documents can use the same transaction currency, even if their organisations have different base currencies. A pair using different transaction currencies converts each invoice line into the bill currency and rounds each converted line to two decimal places.

You can supply a rate and its source or ask for automatic lookup. Automatic lookup uses a Workspace daily override when available, otherwise the XE daily rate already stored in xpnAI for the document date. The assistant does not fetch rates from XE during a request. Future dates require an explicit rate. If lookup is unavailable, supply an agreed rate and source rather than guessing.

The proposal distinguishes the recharge conversion from each document’s conversion from its organisation’s base currency. It shows the date, source and direction of every rate. Rates are saved with the proposal and do not change when you approve or create the drafts. Tax is calculated separately using each organisation’s selected tax codes, so the gross totals can differ even when the underlying charges match.

Approve and create drafts

Review both organisations and contacts, document and due dates, all line descriptions, accounts, tax codes, tracking options, currencies, rates and totals. Ask for corrections before approving. Changing the plan creates a new revision that requires fresh approval.

After you explicitly approve that proposal, your assistant creates the documents as DRAFT in Xero. It does not authorise, email or pay them. Review and authorise each draft in Xero yourself. The supplier bill number includes the plan reference so it can be identified during reconciliation.

For a single bill or invoice, ask for just that document. The same review and approval process applies.

If only one side is created

The two organisations are saved separately. One document may succeed while the other fails. Ask your assistant to show the saved plan and each document’s result. Keep the successful document and continue within the same plan after correcting a known failure. You can revise the unsent side and approve the new proposal; the saved side, dates and business reference stay fixed.

If the outcome is uncertain, inspect the destination organisation in Xero and give your assistant the actual document ID for reconciliation. xpnAI checks it against the approved proposal before recording success. Do not create a replacement plan or resend a confirmed document. If someone changed or authorised the draft in Xero, resolve that difference manually before continuing.

You can cancel a plan only while none of its documents has been sent. Cancellation does not undo any Xero document.