How Expense Reports Work in Xero

Once an expense report is published to Xero from Dext Prepare, you can access the report and make changes to it in your Xero Account.

There are three areas you can publish expense reports to in Xero:

• Purchases
• Classic Expense Claims
• Bank Accounts

In this article you can also see:

• How to Publish an Expense Report to Xero with an Image of the Original Item Attached
• Publishing Costs Items to Classic Expense Claims in Xero

Please note: Expense reports and items cannot currently be published to Xero’s new expense claims feature. We are working to add this in the future.

Purchases

Expense reports can be published to the Purchases section in Xero as a Draft, Awaiting Approval or Awaiting Payment. 

You can then find the report in Xero by going to: 

1. The Business tab
2. Then Bills to pay
3. And finally, the relevant section – Draft, Awaiting Approval or Awaiting Payment.

Classic Expense Claims 

Before publishing a report to the Classic Expense Claims section in Xero you must keep in mind the following:

Important: In order to publish the report to this destination, the user who owns the report in Dext Prepare must be linked to Xero, otherwise the following error message will show when publishing the report: ‘A valid user should be identified using the UserID’. Follow the steps outlined in the linked article to link the Dext user to Xero. Once this is done, the Expense Report should be refreshed (head to the expense report and click on the Refresh button). Then click on the Publish button. 

Please note: When you send items or Expense Reports to the Classic Expense Claims section of Xero, they will appear there as Draft, and only the user to whom the item or reports belong (in Dext) will be able to view and submit them for approval in Xero. Those items will then be visible to the users with the relevant privileges in Xero. 

Once the expense report is published to Xero you can access the report in Xero by going to:

1. The Business tab. 
2. Then Expense Claims.
3. And finally Current Claim. 

Bank Accounts

Important: before publishing to Bank Accounts a Payment Method must be assigned using a Payment Method that has been linked with a bank account. 

Once the report is published to Xero you can find it by going to:

1. The Accounting tab in Xero
2. Then Bank Accounts
3. Select the relevant bank account. 
4. Then go to Account transactions. 

How to Publish an Expense Report to Xero with an Image of the Original Item Attached

You can link an image of the original item to the report when it is published to Xero by enabling the Image Sharing option in Dext Prepare. 

To do this:

1. Go to My Profile in the Sidebar menu.
2. Then Account Details.
3. And finally scroll down to the Image Sharing section and set the toggle to ON.

The system will embed a link to an image of the original item in the expense report PDF. You can view the image by clicking the hyperlink listed in the Item ID column of the PDF.

Publishing Costs Items to Classic Expense Claims in Xero

Before publishing costs items to the Classic Expense Claims section in Xero you must keep in mind the following:

Important: In order to publish the item to this destination, the user who owns the item in Dext Prepare must be linked to Xero, otherwise the following error message will show when publishing the item: ‘A valid user should be identified using the UserID’.  Follow the steps outlined in the linked article to link the Dext user to Xero. Then click on the Publish button. 

Please note: When you send items to the Classic Expense Claims section of Xero, they will appear there as Draft, and only the user to whom the item belong (in Dext) will be able to view and submit them for approval in Xero. Those items will then be visible to the users with the relevant privileges in Xero. 

Once the costs item is published to Xero you can access the item in Xero by going to:

4. The Business tab. 
5. Then Expense Claims.
6. And finally Current Claim.