Accounting Export

All amounts are in Australian dollars.

What this is

Billing → Reports gives you a period's numbers as a set of CSV files your bookkeeper can open in Excel or import into your accounting package.

It is a file you send, not a live connection. That is deliberate: a file works with every accounting package, and nothing in Wattle needs to be connected, authorised or kept in sync. If you change accountants or packages, the export still works.

Common tasks

Getting the files

1. Go to Billing → Reports.
2. The dates default to last month, which is what you usually want. Change them if not.
3. Read the table if you just want a look.
4. Click Download CSV set. You get one .zip file. Email it to your bookkeeper, or unzip it and open the sheets yourself.

The download is greyed out when there are no issued invoices in the period. That is not an error, there is just nothing to report.

What is in the zip

Five files. Your bookkeeper will mostly care about the first two.

The one thing worth understanding

Two of these sheets answer different questions, and mixing them up is the only real trap.

• revenue-by-category.csv is what you earned. It counts an invoice on the day you issued it, whether or not the client has paid yet.
• takings-by-method.csv is what you banked. It counts money on the day it arrived, and subtracts anything you handed back. The last three rows spell that out - what you took, what you refunded, and the net - so the sheet can be reconciled against the bank without doing the arithmetic yourself. Those rows are always there, even in a period with no refunds, so a missing refunds line never has to be interpreted.

Those two will not match, and they are not supposed to. An invoice you issued in June and got paid for in July is June revenue and July takings. Most small practices report GST on what they actually received, so your bookkeeper will usually reconcile the takings sheet against the bank. The cover sheet says which is which, so you do not have to remember.

What is deliberately left out

Draft invoices are not counted. A draft is not a tax invoice yet, so it is not revenue. If you have drafts sitting in the period, the page tells you how many and what they add up to, so you can finalise them and download again if that was an oversight. This is the most common reason for "the numbers look low".

Reversals are handled carefully rather than just dropped. A cancelled invoice stops counting from the period you cancelled it in, never from the period it was issued in. That matters because your earlier numbers may already be on a lodged BAS, and quietly changing them later is how books stop balancing.

adjustments.csv carries both ways an invoice gets reversed, each row labelled so your bookkeeper can tell them apart:

• Credit notes - every one you raised in this period, with the reason you gave. These appear here even when they credit an invoice from the same month, because a credit note is its own document with its own date. The invoice it credits still counts as that month's income; the two net out correctly between the sheets.
• Voids - an invoice from an earlier period that you voided during this one.

Most of that sheet will be credit notes, since Wattle only lets you void an invoice nobody has seen yet.

The practical version: re-downloading an old period gives you the same numbers you got the first time. That is the point.

"Everything says Uncategorised"

The Category column groups your revenue by what you sold, using what was recorded on each invoice line at the time.

If a line shows as Uncategorised, it was billed without a catalogue item to identify it, usually a line typed straight onto an invoice by hand. The money is still counted correctly in every total. Only the grouping is missing.

To avoid it, bill from the catalogue rather than typing free-text lines. A line added from Catalogue always records what it was.

GST

The export follows your clinic's GST setting exactly, including whether your prices already include GST. If you are not registered for GST, the GST column reads zero throughout.

Both are shown on the cover sheet, so your bookkeeper can see the setting rather than having to ask.

Working with your bookkeeper

Send the whole zip, not one sheet. The cover sheet is what makes the others safe to read.

If they ask for a file formatted for a specific package, that is not built yet. A Xero-shaped and an MYOB-shaped version of the same data are planned. Today the generic sheets import into every package with a bit of column mapping, which is a normal thing for a bookkeeper to do once and reuse.

Related

• Taking Payments - how money is recorded and allocated
• Invoices - finalising, sending and voiding
• Charges vs Invoices - why a charge is not yet revenue