If you're running a trade business, there's a good chance your bookkeeping happens in two places: your job management software, where the actual work — quotes, invoices, payments — gets recorded, and Xero, where your accountant or bookkeeper expects to see it. Keeping those two in sync by hand is where a lot of small business hours quietly disappear.
The real cost of manual double-entry
Every customer you re-type into Xero, every invoice you re-create because the job software and the accounting software don't talk to each other, every payment you have to manually match up — none of it is hard, but it all adds up. It's also exactly the kind of repetitive data entry where a typo (a transposed digit on an invoice total, a customer created twice with slightly different spelling) causes real reconciliation headaches later.
What a good sync should actually do
- Create the customer as a Xero contact automatically the first time you send them an invoice — not before, so Xero doesn't fill up with contacts for quotes that never went anywhere
- Push invoices across the moment they're sent, not while they're still a draft you might change
- Record payments against the right invoice automatically, including partial payments, so an invoice's status in Xero always matches what's actually been paid
- Tell you clearly, in your job software, how many customers or invoices haven't synced yet — rather than leaving you to discover a gap during reconciliation
How SJMS's Xero sync works
SJMS connects to your own Xero organisation via OAuth — a one-time approval, then it stays connected until you disconnect it. From there it's a one-way sync (SJMS → Xero, nothing changed in Xero flows back): new and updated customers become Xero contacts, sent invoices become Xero invoices with the correct GST math, and recorded payments — including partial payments — mark them paid on the Xero side too. The connection card in SJMS shows a live count of anything still waiting to sync, so you're never guessing. Full setup steps are in Connect Xero to sync invoices.
Once it's connected, the sync happens in the background every time you do what you were already doing — sending an invoice, recording a payment — so there's genuinely nothing extra to remember.