Actionstep Practice Management offers an integration with Xero that allows you to do your billing, trust/client accounting, and general matter management in Practice Management and have all your accounting information automatically updated in Xero.

Practice Management includes full-featured billing, trust accounting, and general business accounting modules. An organization may wish to adopt these features of Practice Management without being forced to change their accounting system in the process. Implementing an integration with Xero can help with this.

How Xero Integrates with Practice Management's Native Accounting

When you are using Practice Management's native accounting, you have a built-in general ledger in your Practice Management system. You can use this for all your accounting needs, but some users prefer to use Xero because it's what they're used to, what their accountant supports, or for other reasons.

When you integrate Practice Management with Xero, the transactions you enter will still be posted to Practice Management's general ledger, but the integration will create duplicates of those transactions in your Xero account.

Before You Integrate with Xero

Before you integrate, make sure you understand how the integration works.

Integration is One-Directional

The Practice Management integration with Xero is built to allow you to do your billing and trust/client accounting in Practice Management and have the accounting information updated in Xero. This means the integration works only one way—from Practice Management to Xero. When you create an invoice in Practice Management it will create an invoice in Xero. When you create a payment in Practice Management for that invoice, it will create a payment in Xero against that invoice. However, if you create an invoice in Xero, it does not create an invoice in Practice Management. If you pay an invoice in Xero, even an invoice that was originally created in Practice Management, it does NOT create a payment in Practice Management.

Not All Transactions are Supported

Not all accounting transactions you enter in Practice Management will be pushed through to Xero.

For example, the following accounting transactions are pushed through to Xero:

• Sales and purchase information such as the bills you send to clients, supplier/vendor invoices and credit notes
• Payments to those sales and purchase transactions such as payments to your client bills or supplier/vendor invoices
• Bank to bank transfers
• All trust transactions

However, the following accounting transactions are NOT pushed through to Xero:

• General journal entries

Additionally, general retainers are not currently supported with Xero. If you have general retainers configured, you will need to unconfigure them. To do this, remove any retainer balances from your matters.

For a complete list of what's supported, see Supported Transactions, below.

Locking Transactions

Once you are integrated with Xero, Practice Management will mark each transaction as locked. This is done so a Practice Management user does not make changes to the transactions in Practice Management that are not yet reflected in Xero. However, you can unlock transactions if you need to edit them. 

Pre-Integration Transactions

Transactions will only pass through to Xero after you integrate the systems. Additionally, only new transactions will be pushed through. Any existing invoices, account balances, or payments you have made in Practice Management, will not be created in Xero. Only new transactions created in Practice Management will be in Xero.

Once you integrate, you may want to consider moving any open invoices back into draft and saving them again. Saving them again pushes them through to Xero. Any partially paid invoices will either have to have the payments removed, moved back into draft, reposted and re-paid, or you will have to ensure that you deal with those payments in Xero separately from Practice Management.

Working with Divisions

While Practice Management supports having multiple divisions for its built-in accounting, its integration with Xero does not support more than one division. You cannot link a different division to a different Xero Account.

Supported Transactions 

Information in the following table outlines what can/cannot be done using the Xero Integration with the Actionstep Practice Pro + Accounting option:

Client Billing

Trust Accounting

Supplier / Vendor Transactions

Banking Transactions

Other Accounting Functions

Limitations of the Integration

Before implementing the Practice Management / Xero integration, please be mindful of some of the limitations:

• The Practice Management / Xero integration cannot be used on a system utilizing multiple currencies.
• Any Practice Management database utilizing this integration should be set to the Accrual Accounting method. This will allow for invoices to be transferred to Xero prior to payment. Accounting method settings in Xero will determine the accounting method used for reporting.
• It is not recommended that you use Xero's automatic bank feed if you are intending to process invoice payments in Practice Management.
• Transactions sent from Practice Management to Xero will post the sum of the line items attributed to each general ledger account in the transaction. This means that though all of the transaction information will match, the layout of the invoice may vary slightly.
• Do not connect a Xero trial account to a Practice Management system that will later need to use a live Xero account. If a trial account is connected and later becomes invalid, a new Practice Management system will need to be created and a new Xero account connected.
• When a Xero account is connected to Practice Management, accounts are allocated to specific accounting and billing functions. The first connected Xero account will write these accounts to Practice Management. Replacing the Xero account will not overwrite the accounts, creating a discrepancy between Xero and the available accounts in Practice Management.

Updated May 26, 2026 20:39