Getting the invoices to your accountant

For the books, on the Owed page, gives you every invoice and credit note in a period as a spreadsheet file. It imports into Xero and QuickBooks — both ask you to match the columns up the first time and remember it afterwards — and it opens in Excel or Numbers if your accountant would rather just read it.

Pick the dates and press Show, and it tells you what the file will contain before you download it: how many invoices, how many credit notes, the totals and the VAT. The figures are always for the same dates the Download button carries, so you can tell at a glance whether the import worked.

Documents are counted by when they were issued, not by when the group camped. A March invoice for an August camp belongs to March, which is what an accountant expects and what filtering by the stay would get wrong.

Credit notes are their own rows, with positive amounts and a Document column saying what they are. They are not negative invoices — both Xero and QuickBooks treat a credit note as its own kind of document, and a negative invoice imports as a mess in either. The totals on screen show what you invoiced and what you credited separately and never netted off, because £14,000 invoiced with £1,520 credited is a different fact from £12,480 invoiced. VAT is the exception and is shown net, because what you owe on a period is what you charged minus what you gave back.

Everything in the file is exactly as it was on the document you sent. Renaming a customer, moving premises or registering for VAT never rewrites what has already gone out — if it did, an export your accountant signed off last month would stop saying what they signed off.

You need to be able to see money to use it, the same as the rest of the Owed page.