If your shop reviews invoices before they go out, you can now hold them in Xero as drafts instead of having them land ready to collect. Two settings control what status Factory sends records across in: one for sales orders, one for invoices. Set the invoice one to draft and your finance team can work through them in Xero, approving each before it moves to Awaiting Payment. Nothing changes unless you change it, so if the current flow suits you there is nothing to do here.
đď¸ Before you start
Your Xero integration needs to be connected. If you have not set it up yet, see Xero integration first. These two settings apply to Xero only. They do not affect MYOB or QuickBooks connections.
What syncs, and when
Factory sends a record to Xero at two points in a job:
When a sales order is created or updated
When an invoice is created
Each of those two moments has its own setting, so you can treat them differently. Most shops that change anything here change only the invoice setting.
đď¸ Note
Xero has no equivalent of a sales order. Everything Factory sends across arrives in Xero as an invoice record, whether it started life as a Factory sales order or a Factory invoice. The status it arrives in is what separates the two, which is why these settings control status rather than record type.
Settings
Go to Settings > Integrations and open your Xero integration settings. You will find two options:
When a sales order syncs to Xero, send as: Keep as Draft, or Mark as Awaiting Payment
When an invoice syncs to Xero, send as: Keep as Draft, or Mark as Awaiting Payment
The defaults match how Factory has always behaved:
Choose Keep as Draft to hold the record in Xero so someone can review it before it is actioned. Choose Mark as Awaiting Payment to send it straight through to the payable queue.
There is no option to send a record across as Paid. Xero sets that itself once a payment is recorded against the invoice, so marking something as Paid without an actual payment behind it would leave your accounts out of balance.
Holding invoices for approval
This is the reason most shops come to these settings. If your finance team or owner signs off invoices before they are treated as ready to collect, set the invoice setting to Keep as Draft.
Go to Settings > Integrations and open your Xero settings.
Set When an invoice syncs to Xero, send as to Keep as Draft.
Save.
From then on, invoices you create in Factory arrive in Xero as drafts. Your finance team reviews them in Xero and moves each one to Awaiting Payment once approved. Factory no longer makes that call for you.
Sending invoices from Xero rather than Factory
Some shops prefer Xero's email and PDF templates to Factory's, usually for branding. If you send your invoices from Xero, set the invoice setting to Keep as Draft so they wait for you rather than arriving already marked as ready to collect. You then send them from Xero as normal.
Things worth knowing
Partial invoices follow the invoice setting. A partial invoice takes the same path to Xero as a full one, so if you have set invoices to Keep as Draft, partial invoices arrive as drafts too.
Changes apply going forward only. If you switch the setting after some invoices have already synced, the ones already in Xero stay as they are. Only records that sync from that point on use the new setting.
The two settings are independent. Changing how invoices sync does not change how sales orders sync, and the other way round.