Finance Team Implementation Guide

Automate Accruals, Prepayments & Deferred Revenue in Xero

This guide outlines key considerations and best practices when implementing Spread within a finance function.

Following this pathway ensures a smooth onboarding process, accurate financial data handling, and maximum benefit from the platform.

In This Guide

Initial Set Up - set up billing, timing, your Xero connection and your team
Training - short, role-based modules to complete before you start
Migrating From an Existing Workflow - moving off spreadsheets and old journals cleanly
Running Spread Week to Week - the recommended ongoing workflow
Team Email Template - copy and paste to bring your team on board

Initial Set Up & Billing

The user responsible for setting up and managing billing should complete the initial setup of Spread.

Timing Your Implementation

Best practice: implement Spread after a closed management reporting period, and no later than one month after the period ends.

If you do monthly management accounts, implement at the beginning of the new period so you start benefiting from Spread immediately.

This window gives you a clean transition and the maximum historical lookback benefit.

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. 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 you add, so Spread can calculate average values for variable expenses, show historical supplier behaviour, and identify missing invoices. Codes added later only pull new transactions, not historical activity.

Connect Your Organisation

Connect your 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 Finance Team Members to Spread

Invite team members 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 team 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 team workspace. Once they've accepted, assign their organisation access from the Users area.

Training

Before using Spread, everyone should complete the training relevant to their role in the Help area:

Cost and Sales inbox - how to review and post accruals, prepayments and deferred revenue journals to Xero.

Tracking Bills for Recurring Costs - setting suppliers up for tracking, accruing for missing bills, and reversing them.

How to Reconcile Spread to your Balance Sheet - using Spread's reports to reconcile all posted adjustments back to your Xero balance sheet

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 you maintain 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 in 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 Week to Week

The Recommended Workflow

Post expense invoices and receipts directly to the correct cost centres, automating supplier capture through your OCR or invoice capture tool where possible.
Review those postings.
Check that tracking categories have been assigned correctly to the transactions in Xero, any tracking you add at source is replicated in Spread's adjustment journals.
Once tracking is checked, work through the Spread inboxes.
At month end, use the Recurring Bills area to accrue for missing costs and reverse any previously accrued costs that have since been invoiced.
Review Spread's reports and reconcile posted adjustments back to the 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. Worth feeding back to whoever posts invoices in Xero. A small change with a noticeably better result.

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.

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 to manage accruals, prepayments, deferred revenue and related journal schedules more efficiently.

Instead of relying on spreadsheets and manual journals, Spread gives us a single, controlled process, improving accuracy, saving time, creating consistency, and giving us cleaner data to make decisions from.

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 our Xero organisation yourself, this makes sure you join the correct shared 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.

Any questions, just reach out. We'll keep refining the workflow as a team.

Thanks, [Your Name]

Workflow Support

We want to make sure your finance team gets the maximum benefit from Spread. Our team is available to help you map and optimise your internal finance workflows as you implement it.

Initial Set Up