Accountancy Practice Implementation Guide
Automate Accruals, Prepayments & Deferred Revenue Across Your Client Portfolio
This guide outlines the key considerations and recommended workflow for implementing Spread across an accountancy practice and rolling it out to clients Xero organisations.
Following this pathway will help your firm onboard clients smoothly, standardise how adjustments are managed, reduce spreadsheet dependency, and improve the accuracy and consistency of client management reporting.
For practices, the goal is not just to implement a tool client by client, but to create a repeatable firm-wide workflow that staff can follow consistently across a portfolio of similar clients.
In This Guide
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Initial Set Up - set up billing, timing, connect a client and add your team
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Training - short, role-based modules to complete before staff go live on clients
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Choosing Your First Clients - which clients to onboard first, and which to avoid early on
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Migrating From an Existing Workflow - moving off spreadsheets and old journals cleanly
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Running Spread Client by Client - the recommended ongoing workflow and review cadence
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Team Email Template - copy and paste to bring your team onboard
Initial Set Up & Billing
The user responsible for setting up and managing billing should complete the initial setup of Spread. Where possible, this should be the Master Administrator for your firm in Xero.
Important: because a single token connection serves all users linked to the Spread practice workspace, this user must have access to every Xero client at an administrator level that needs to be connected.
Log in to Spread here to get started
Timing Your Client Onboarding
Best practice: implement Spread for a client after a closed management reporting period, and no later than one month after the period ends.
If the client receives monthly management accounts, implement at the beginning of the new period so the team start benefiting from Spread immediately.
This window allows the practice to establish a clean transition, understand the client's chart of accounts and typical transactions, identify discrepancies early, gain the maximum historical lookback benefit, and avoid duplicating adjustments already posted under the previous workflow.
Lookback Periods
Activity Date: pulls in transactions based on Xero activity date, everything processed or edited in Xero since the beginning of the prior month. By default, this can only be set to the beginning of the prior month, which is why we recommend implementing within one month of closing a period. Depending on how and when bookkeeping is completed, you may still be able to proceed outside this recommendation. If you need to pull through transactions from further back, speak to us.
Transaction Date: based on the Invoice or Spend/Receive Money transaction date.
Recurring Bills: pulls a 12-month lookback for suppliers added to the Recurring Bills area, so Spread can calculate average values for variable expenses, show historical supplier behaviour, accrue for missing bills in a historical period, and identify when a previously accrued missing bill should be reversed once the invoice lands.
Connect A Client Organisation
Connect a client's Xero organisation, and the initial sync can take anywhere between 5 minutes and 2 hours depending on transaction volume. The status will change to Ready once it's complete.
The video below explains how to set up your organisation and how to optimise your settings:
Invite Additional Staff Members to Spread
Invite staff from the Users menu. Once invited, they create their own Spread account and accept the invitation when they log in. They won't receive an email invitation, so let them know to look for the banner at the top of the screen.
Once they've accepted, you can assign their organisation access from the Users area, and they will see only their organisations on their dashboard.
Important: If a staff member connects to the Xero organisation before accepting their invitation, they risk creating a separate Spread workspace and duplicating actions, rather than joining the shared practice workspace. Once they've accepted, assign their organisation access from the Users area of the master subscriber.
Training
Before using Spread, everyone should complete the training relevant to their role in the Help area, and this should be finished before staff begin posting journals for live clients:
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Cost and Sales inbox - how to review and post accruals, prepayments and deferred revenue journals to Xero.
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Tracking Bills for Recurring Costs - setting suppliers up for tracking, accruing for missing bills, and reversing them.
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How to Reconcile Spread to your Balance Sheet - using Spread's reports to reconcile all posted adjustments back to your client's balance sheet in Xero.
For practice rollouts, identify one internal Spread champion who understands the full workflow and can support other staff as new clients are added. This same training list is used in the Team Email Template later in this guide, so you only need to send your team one link.
Choosing Your First Clients
Start with priority clients where Spread's value will be clear and the team can learn the workflow quickly. A good first client typically has:
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Regular monthly management accounts
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Costs that are invoiced in arrears
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Suppliers who bill in advance
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Deferred income, such as subscriptions or memberships
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A manageable transaction volume
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A reasonably clean Xero file
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Reasonable quality line descriptions against their transactions
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A client team that's open to improving the reporting workflow
A client with these characteristics helps staff understand how Spread handles common accounting scenarios early on.
Avoid starting with the most complex or least tidy client unless there's a strong operational reason to. A clean first implementation makes it easier to train the team and build confidence before rolling out further.
Migrate From an Existing Workflow
We recommend implementing Spread at the beginning of a new management period to avoid duplicating adjustments.
Prepayments & Deferred Revenue
If there's an existing prepayment or deferred revenue schedule already in Xero, that's fine; leave it running. If you previously posted these as recurring journals, just make sure the end date aligns with the service period.
If the practice maintains a prepayment or deferred revenue schedule in a spreadsheet that hasn't been posted to Xero yet, we'd recommend posting it, either as detailed recurring journals with an end date set to the end of the prepayment period, or as summarised manual journals for each remaining month. You can also import journals into Xero to help migrate from an existing system.
Future invoices will be captured by Spread and handled within the new workflow going forward. To get a clean, clearly defined workflow, the team should move onto the new way of working quickly, keep spreadsheets only for non-invoice adjustments such as provisions and WIP.
Existing Accruals
If previously accrued expenses haven't been reversed yet, you have two options:
Option 1 - recreate through Spread: void the existing journal in Xero and recreate the accrual through Spread's Recurring Bills area. Spread's 12-month lookback means it can still track when the reversal should happen once the invoice arrives.
Option 2 - let the existing process run out: maintain your existing process until those accruals have been reversed, then add the supplier to Recurring Bills with the Start Date set to the next billing cycle.
Other Manual Accruals (such as payroll or bonus provision)
For other manual accruals such as tax provisions, payroll accruals and similar, create a dummy supplier, which can be done from Spread and add it to the Recurring Bills area to manage through the same process.
Running Spread Client by Client
The Recommended Workflow
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Post expense invoices and receipts directly to the correct nominal codes and tracking categories in Xero, using OCR or invoice capture tools where possible.
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Review postings to make sure the source transaction is coded correctly.
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Check that tracking categories, cost centres or departments have been assigned correctly in Xero.
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Once the transaction review is complete, work through the relevant Spread inboxes.
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At the end of the reporting period, use the Recurring Bills area to accrue for missing costs and reverse previously accrued costs once the invoice has landed.
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Review Spread's reports and reconcile posted adjustments back to the client's balance sheet in Xero.
Getting The Most Accurate Journals
Spread reads your Xero line descriptions first, before it looks at the attachment. The more precise the description, the more confidently Spread identifies the right period and drafts the right journal first time.
If you're seeing a lot of transactions marked Not Identified, it's usually a vague or missing description. “Insurance - March 26 to February 27” gives Spread everything it needs. “Insurance renewal” doesn't.
This matters more in a practice environment, where bookkeeping may be done by junior staff, offshore teams, outsourced providers or the client directly. Feeding this back early improves Spread's results and reduces review time across the whole portfolio. A small change in posting behaviour creates a noticeably better month-end outcome.
Reducing Inbox Noise
As you operate in Spread, optimise your settings for efficiency. Go to Settings to exclude contacts or remove nominal codes that aren't worth reviewing. Spread will stop pulling those transactions into the inbox. You can still check the auto-excluded tab at month-end if you want to.
Most teams who do this in the first week find their inbox is noticeably cleaner by month end, with review time dropping accordingly.
Setting Review Cadence Per Client
Not every client needs the same review cadence. Higher-volume or more complex management accounts clients benefit from weekly review, which keeps Spread clean and reduces pressure at month-end. Lower-volume clients may only need bi-weekly or monthly review, provided transactions are posted and coded before the Spread review begins.
Define the cadence client by client or simply have a practice-wide approach, and make sure the responsible team member follows it consistently.
Team Email Template
Copy, paste and send once your team has been invited to Spread:
Hi Team,
You've been invited to join Spread, which we'll use as an adjustment layer with Xero for selected client organisations, helping us manage accruals, prepayments, deferred revenue and related journal schedules more efficiently in our client reporting workflow.
Instead of relying on spreadsheets and manual journals, Spread gives us a single, controlled process, improving accuracy, saving time, creating consistency, making handovers easier, and improving review quality for managers and partners to give clients cleaner financial information.
If there are any clients you think would be a good fit for Spread, let me know and I'll get them set up ready for you.
Before getting started, please complete the training modules in the Help Centre; it's short and role-based.
Important: please accept your invitation inside Spread before connecting to any Xero organisation yourself. This makes sure you join the correct shared practice workspace and avoids a duplicate environment. Once you've accepted, log in, then reply to this email (or message me) and I'll assign your access to the relevant client organisations.
Any questions, just reach out. We'll keep refining the workflow as a practice.
Thanks, [Your Name]
Workflow Support
We want to make sure your practice gets the maximum benefit from Spread. Our team is available to help you map and optimise your internal workflows as you roll Spread out across clients.
If you'd like help reviewing your processes, selecting the right first clients, or setting up a standardised adjustment workflow, schedule a call with us.