Export your books from Xero

The reports

Your cutover date is on your onboarding page. Use it wherever this table says cutover.

1. Open each report

In the menu at the top, select Reporting, then All reports. Type the report's name in the search box, or find it in the list. The chart of accounts isn't a report: it's under Accounting, Chart of accounts, with its own Export button.

2. Set the dates, and check the basis

At the top of the report, set the date or the date range from the table, then select Update. For the Trial Balance, add the Account Code column under Columns, and leave comparisons off: with a comparison on, Xero shows one net column per period instead of debits and credits. Check the report is on the Accrual basis.

Run the Trial Balance once for each date we need. If your financial year starts on January 1 and your cutover is April 30, 2026, that's five: December 31, 2025, then January 31, February 28, March 31 and April 30. Set Date to each one in turn. If your cutover is the last day of your financial year, you only need that one.

We read the YTD Debit and YTD Credit columns. They hold each account's balance on that date and, for income and expenses, the financial year to date, which is how we tell what each month did. Check the financial year end in Xero's settings is the one we have for you.

Before you export them, compare the YTD columns on two month-ends. An income account should be at least as big at each month-end as it was at the one before, because it's the year to date. If it's smaller across the board, check that comparisons are off and that the financial year end in Xero's settings is yours, then run the report again.

3. Export

Select Export, then Excel. If Excel isn't offered, choose CSV. Do the Trial Balance again for each date, and keep every file. Invoices and bills export from their own lists: select all of them on the All tab, then Export. Xero exports 500 at a time, so do it in batches if you have more.

Your customers, suppliers, and products and services

These three come over a different way: you bring each one over yourself, on your onboarding page under Your lists, and see every row before anything is added. Names, contact details, payment terms and prices come over. Nothing already there is overwritten, and no balances come over this way.

To get each one out of Xero:

• Customers: in the Contacts menu, select Customers, then the menu (⋯) at the top right, then Export. Xero downloads a file called Contacts.csv.
• Suppliers: the same, from Suppliers instead. It downloads as Contacts.csv too, so rename one of them.
• Products and services: in the Sales menu, select Products and services, then Export, then CSV.

Xero puts a contact in Customers once you've invoiced them, and in Suppliers once you've entered a bill from them. A contact you've done neither with is only in All contacts: if you need one, export All contacts and bring that file over as customers or suppliers, whichever they are.

Then, on your onboarding page under Your lists, choose Bring it over beside each list. Choose Xero as where the list is now, then the file. Check what each column holds, check the rows, and choose Bring it over. If a list has nothing in it, say no suppliers, choose Nothing to bring instead.

Bank details never come over. If an export has columns for bank account numbers, they're left out of the import and out of the copy we keep.

4. Upload the reports

On your onboarding page, upload every report to the Xero exports line, including every Trial Balance. You can upload several at once, and we tell the Trial Balances apart by the date each one says it is as at. We check them against your statements before anything is brought in.

If a report isn't there

If you can't find a report, or your role in Xero doesn't let you export it, export the General Ledger Detail for the same dates and tell us on your onboarding page. We'll work from that.

Common questions