Implement Spread Across Your Finance Team

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.

Change Management

Every finance team has slightly different processes, responsibilities and ways of working. Before implementing Spread, here are some helpful areas to align on so the rollout feels smooth.

Some useful topics to consider include:

How accruals and prepayments are currently managed
Existing month-end workflows and review processes
How responsibilities are delegated across the finance team
How existing OCR or invoice capture tools are being used
If and when tracking categories are added to transactions to Xero

If you would like guidance on how Spread can fit in with your existing processes, our team would be happy to help.

Recommended Approach

Supplier invoice processing can now be largely automated, with adjustments managed directly within Spread.

Recommended weekly 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 postings from Step 1
Check that tracking categories have been assigned correctly to your transactions in Xero
Each week once Step 3 has been completed, work through the Spread inboxes.
At the end of each month using the Recurring Bills area to accrue for missing costs and reverse any previously accrued missing costs that have since been invoiced.

This ensures Spread delivers its full automation and financial control benefits. Any tracking you added to the source transaction in Xero will be replicated in the adjustment journals posted from Spread.

How to get the most from Spread

Accurate line descriptions = more accurate journals

Spread reads your Xero line descriptions first, before it looks at the attachment. The more precise the description on the transaction, the more confidently Spread can identify the correct period and draft the right journal first time.

If you're seeing lots of transactions marked as 'Not Identified', it's often because the line description is vague or missing. A description like "Insurance - March 26 to February 27" gives Spread everything it needs. "Insurance renewal" does not.

It's worth feeding this back to whoever is posting invoices in Xero. Small change. Noticeably better results.

Remove the noise so you can focus on what matters

The goal is an inbox that only shows you work worth doing.

Go to Settings to exclude contacts or remove the nominal codes that are not worth spending time to review. Spread will stop pulling those transactions into the inbox.

You can still do a quick check in the auto-excluded tab at month end if you want to.

Most users who do this in the first week find their inbox is significantly cleaner by month-end, and their review time drops accordingly.

When to implement?

Spread should ideally be implemented after a closed management reporting period, and no later than one month after the period ends.

If you do monthly management accounts, we would recommend implementing it at the beginning of the new period right away to start benefiting from Spread in the new period.

Implementing within this window allows the finance team to:

Establish a clean transition
Gain the maximum historical lookback benefit

Lookback Periods

When setting up, it’s important to be aware of how far back Spread can look and what it can pull through.

By default, the Start Date can only be set to the beginning of the prior month. This is why we recommend setting up Spread within 1 month after closing a period. Depending on how and when the bookkeeping is done, you may be able to proceed outside of this recommendation.

Start Date: This will pull in transactions based on Xero activity date i.e. everything that was processed or edited within Xero since the beginning of the prior month.

Transaction Date: This is based on Invoice or Spend/Receive Money transaction dates.

If you need to pull transactions through that precede the beginning of the previous month, speak to us.

How To Transfer Away From Your Existing Workflow

Prepayments & Deferred Revenue

We recommend implementing Spread at the beginning of a new management period to avoid any duplication of adjustments.

If there is an existing prepayment or deferred revenue schedule already in Xero this is absolutely fine.

If you previously posted these as recurring journals, ensure the end date aligns with the service period.

If you maintain a prepayment or deferred revenue schedule in a Spreadsheet and they are not yet posted to Xero, we’d recommend posting these, either at a detailed level as recurring journals with an end date set to be the end of the prepayment period or posted as summarised journals manually for each month until the last month covered by your existing prepayments. You can also import journals into Xero to help with migrations from any existing systems.

Future invoices will be captured by Spread and handled within the new workflow going forward. In order to benefit from Spread with a clearly defined workflow, it’s important that the team embrace the new way of working quickly, only using Spreadsheets for non-invoice-related adjustments such as provisions and WIP.

When working through the inboxes, you can use the Activity Date filter to only review items that have been posted or edited within Xero since the implementation of Spread.

Existing Accruals

If previously accrued expenses have not yet been reversed, you have two options:

Option 1

Void the existing journal in Xero and recreate the accrual through Spread in the Recurring Bills area.

Spread allows a 12-month lookback, which will enable it to track when the reversal should occur once the invoice is received.

Option 2

Maintain your existing process until all of these accruals have been reversed.

Going forward, add the supplier to the Recurring Bills area with the Start Date set to the next billing cycle.

Workaround for other manual accruals

If you’d like to post other forms of manual accruals through Spread, such as tax provisions, payroll accruals etc you can create a dummy supplier and add them into the Recurring Bills area to be managed through the same process.

How to quickly catch up with Spread

When working through the inboxes, you can use the Activity Date filter to only review items that have been posted or edited within Xero since the implementation of Spread.

You might have tested Spread over a period which has now been closed. If you need to clear down the inbox quickly, you can filter by document date and use the bulk date applicator to match the service dates to the invoice date - this will ensure each transaction is set to no action required, allowing you to bulk clear the inbox down quickly. See the video below for a quick demonstration:

Time for Lift-off!

Initial Setup and Billing

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

Connect Your Organisation

Watch the set up video below

The initial sync can take anywhere between 5 minutes and 2 hours, depending on the volume of transactions that are being pulled through. You’ll see the Status change to Ready when the initial sync is complete.

Invite Additional Finance Team Members

Invite additional members of the finance team from the Users tab.

Once invited, team members can create their own Spread accounts and accept the invitation visible when they log in. They will see a banner prompting them to accept the invitation at the top of the screen. Note, they will not receive an invitation by email.

Once users have accepted their invitation into your Spread subscription, you’ll be able to assign access to organisations from the ‘Users’ area.

Important:
If a team member creates their own Spread account and connects to Xero before accepting the invitation, they risk creating a separate Spread workspace. This can lead to duplicated actions because they would be operating from an independent dashboard rather than the shared workspace used by the finance team.

Training

Before using Spread, we’d recommend that all users of Spread navigate to the Help area and complete training relevant to their roles. We have several short training modules that cover:

How to use the Cost and Sales inbox - How to quickly review and post accruals, prepayments and deferred revenue journals to Xero from Spread.
Tracking Bills for Recurring Costs - How to set suppliers up for tracking, how to accrue for missing bills and how to reverse them later.
How Spread works (coming soon) - This is core knowledge that will help the team understand how Spread reads dates and how we populate journal schedules. (recommended for all users)
How to Reconcile Spread to your Balance Sheet - A run-through of how to use our reports to reconcile all adjustments Spread has posted back to your Balance Sheet in Xero

Spread the word

To help with any internal communications, we’ve included a link to a document below to help explain to other internal stakeholders how everything works.

Spread Software for Internal Finance Teams

Team Email Template

Here's an email template you can copy/paste and send to the team once they have been invited:

Hi Team,

You’ve now been invited to join Spread, which we’ll be using as an adjustment layer with Xero. Spread will help us manage accruals, prepayments, deferred revenue and related journal schedules more efficiently within our finance workflow.

What is Spread and why we’re using it

Spread helps automate and standardise how we handle adjustments directly from source transactions in Xero. Instead of relying on spreadsheets and manual journals, it gives us a single, controlled process.

This will help us:

Improve financial accuracy – ensuring adjustments stay aligned with underlying transactions
Save time – reducing manual spreadsheet work and repetitive journal posting
Create consistency – a standardised, easy-to-follow workflow across the team
Make better decisions – cleaner, more reliable financial data over time

Next step: complete training

Before getting started, please head to the Help Centre and complete the relevant training modules.

Training is short and role-based, covering:

Cost & Sales Inbox – how to review and post accruals, prepayments, and deferred revenue
Tracking recurring costs – managing suppliers, accruing missing bills, and reversing them
How to Reconcile Spread to your Balance Sheet - A run-through of how to use our reports to reconcile all adjustments Spread has posted back to your Balance Sheet in Xero
How Spread works (coming soon) – This is core knowledge that will help the team understand how Spread reads dates and how we populate journal schedules. (recommended for everyone)

Important: Accept your invitation

Please make sure you:

Log into Spread and accept your invitation
Reply to this email (or message me) once done

Once you’ve accepted, I will assign you access to the relevant Xero organisations.

⚠️ Important: Please accept the invitation before connecting to Xero yourself. This ensures you join the correct shared workspace and avoids duplicate environments.

If you have any questions as you get started, just reach out. We’ll also be refining our workflow as a team to make sure we get the most out of Spread.

Thanks,

[Your Name]

Happy Spreading! You should have everything you need now to get going.