Recruitment billing that lands in Xero, not in a rekeying queue

A permanent desk raises a handful of invoices a month. A contract desk raises one per contractor per period, and if you run forty contractors on weekly timesheets that is a hundred and sixty invoice lines a month before anyone has thought about extensions, rate reviews or a client that insists on consolidated billing.

That volume is the reason a Xero sync earns its place. The billing rows come from approved timesheet hours against a placement, at the rate current for that period, split by cost centre if the client requires it. Rekeying that many lines is not a workflow, it is a Friday afternoon that reliably introduces at least one error someone has to credit later.

Extensions make it worse. A contractor whose assignment rolls for another twelve weeks does not generate a new placement, but the billing has to continue at whatever rate was agreed for the extension, and the end date everyone is working to has moved. Agencies that track extensions in a calendar reminder tend to discover a lapsed assignment when the contractor mentions it, which is a fortnight of unbilled time nobody can invoice for.

A UK invoice carries a VAT treatment; an Australian one carries GST. Both are determined by the client entity, the service and the jurisdiction, and both are decisions your accountant makes rather than decisions recruitment software should be making on your behalf. What the integration does is carry the tax code you have configured for that client through to Xero unchanged.

We will not describe Surhires as tax compliant, because that is not a thing software can be on your behalf. The capability statement is narrower and more useful: the fields exist, they are set per client billing entity, and what is sent is what you configured. Reverse charge, exemptions and registration thresholds remain a conversation with your accountant.

Raise the invoice on the placement in Surhires so the commercial record stays in one place, then export the billing rows as a CSV and import or enter them in Xero. Xero accepts a CSV import for sales invoices, which makes a period run considerably less painful than typing forty lines by hand.

Then put the Xero invoice number and date back on the placement. It is the same discipline that makes the eventual sync a switch rather than a migration: if your placements already carry their accounting references, turning the connection on changes who does the typing rather than changing where the truth lives.

UK contract placements carry an IR35 status determination, and Australian placements can carry labour-hire licensing fields by state. Those are recorded against the placement in Surhires because they change how the engagement works, not because they change the invoice. Getting them wrong is a compliance problem long before it is an accounting problem.

The integration does not interpret them. It carries the invoice. Status determination statements, deemed employment decisions and licensing obligations remain yours, and the product supports capturing the documents and the expiry dates rather than making the determination for you.

Authorisation runs through the standard Xero consent flow against your own organisation, and can be revoked from either end. Client-to-contact mapping is explicit and reviewed once, then reused, so the sync never guesses which of three similarly named entities should receive a fifteen thousand pound fee invoice.

Sending requires approval by a permitted role in the first release, every attempt is logged with actor and timestamp, and a failed push surfaces as a task rather than disappearing into a background queue. The failure mode we care most about is a silent one, because a missing invoice found in week six is a cash flow problem.