Connecting Wise to Xero: one connection per currency, and what it leaves out

What the Wise connection actually sets up

Wise Business has a native Xero feed, and when your setup fits it, that's the thing to use. It's a direct feed rather than an export, so once it's live the lines arrive on their own and land in the bank account ready to reconcile, without anyone downloading a file. The connection is made from the Wise side and authorised into Xero, which is the first thing that catches people out, because they go hunting for Wise in Xero's list of banks and don't find the flow they were expecting.

Two properties of that connection decide nearly everything that follows, and both are far easier to design around on day one than to discover in month three. It's per currency balance rather than per Wise account, so a business holding four balances is setting up four Xero accounts and four connections. And it backfills roughly twelve months, so a catch-up reaching further back than that isn't going to arrive however many times the connection is remade.

Setting it up, in the order that saves rework

The setup itself is short, and what makes it feel long is doing it in the wrong order, because a connection with no matching Xero account waiting for it either goes nowhere or lands somewhere you then have to unpick line by line.

1. 1List the balances that need to reach Xero

   Open Wise and write down every currency balance with business activity in it, including the ones holding a few hundred that nobody thinks about. That list is the number of connections you're about to make and the number of Xero bank accounts you need, so it's worth having before you touch Xero at all.

2. 2Add one Xero bank account per balance

   Each Wise balance needs its own bank account in Xero in the same currency, which means a Xero plan that carries multi-currency if you hold anything beyond your base currency. Set the accounts up first so every connection has somewhere to land, and name them by currency while you're there.

3. 3Start the connection from Wise

   The link is made on the Wise side and authorised into Xero, and it's held by the person who makes it rather than by the organisation. Worth doing it from an account that isn't about to change hands, because a connection dropped by a permissions change or a departure stops quietly and nothing in Xero announces it.

4. 4Check the first lines that arrive

   Open the bank statements view on each new account and compare the earliest line date with the period you actually need. That one check tells you straight away whether the backfill reached far enough back, and it costs a great deal less in the week you set the feed up than it does at year end.

Once it's running, Xero's own documentation puts feed delivery at roughly every twelve hours, and a feed can be refreshed by hand rather than waiting for the next cycle, so an account that looks a few hours behind first thing in the morning is usually an account behaving exactly as documented.

• About bank feedsXero on how often feed transactions arrive, and how to refresh a feed rather than waiting for the next delivery.
• Connect your bank to XeroXero's own overview of how bank connections work, and the account side you set up before any connection is made.

Each currency balance is a separate account and a separate connection

This is the part that surprises anyone who thinks of Wise as one account. In Xero a bank account has a currency, and a Wise balance has a currency, so a EUR balance feeds a EUR Xero account, a USD balance feeds a USD one, and there's no folding them together into a single Wise account in the ledger. Holding anything past your base currency means a Xero plan that carries multi-currency, which turns the feed into a subscription decision rather than a connection one.

The knock-on effect shows up in conversions. When you move money between two of your own balances it appears on both currency statements, once on the way out and once on the way in, and that's correct, because to the ledger those are two accounts and the money moved between them. It only goes wrong when one side of the pair is connected and the other isn't, because then every conversion reaches Xero as half a transaction, and somebody spends the month trying to match it against an account that has no lines in it.

Naming matters more here than it normally would, because once four accounts are live and three of them are called something like Wise, working out which statement belongs to which account becomes its own small job every month, and it's the sort of job that eventually gets done wrong at speed.

What the connection won't carry

A live connection and a complete ledger aren't the same thing, and five specific cases sit in between them.

• Personal Wise accounts. The Xero feed is a Business account feature, so an account opened before the company existed and still doing business duty has no connection to make, however long you spend looking for it.
• Anything older than the backfill. The connection reaches back about twelve months, which leaves a two-year catch-up, an account inherited from a previous bookkeeper, or a late first year of trading all sitting outside it.
• Balances with no matching Xero account. A currency you haven't set up in Xero produces no lines rather than an error, which is why this one can run for months before anybody notices it.
• The stretch between a drop and a reconnect. The connection is held by the person who made it, so a permissions change can end it without warning, and reconnecting starts the feed from the day you reconnect rather than from the day it stopped.
• Whatever your own account turns out not to cover. Eligibility is decided per account rather than per brand, so what the connection manages on somebody else's setup tells you very little, and the check that does tell you something is the earliest and latest line dates on your own account.

Three of those share a property worth stating plainly, the backfill limit, the unmapped balance and the gap between a drop and a reconnect, which is that a healthy feed today says nothing at all about whether last quarter is complete. A feed delivers forward from the moment it starts and doesn't backfill what came before it, so an account can reconcile beautifully from this week onward and still be short for the eight weeks behind it, and nothing in Xero will flag that, because from Xero's side nothing is wrong any more.

If a Wise feed that used to work has stopped altogether, the four causes and what actually fixes each are the whole subject of our guide to a Wise bank feed that's stopped delivering in Xero. This page is about the setup and its edges rather than the repair.

Read the Wise statement before you post anything from it

Everything the connection doesn't carry comes down to a statement, and Wise gives you a decent one, a separate export per currency balance as PDF or CSV. Where that export carries a running balance column, it's the most useful thing in the file, because it gives you something to check a set of postings against rather than trusting that the export covered the period you asked for.

Two things about a Wise export catch people out, and both of them tend to add money rather than lose it, which is what makes them hard to spot. Fees can sit inside the transaction amount or in a column of their own depending on the export you took, so map that column once against a transaction you can check by hand rather than assuming either way, because counting a fee twice quietly overstates every payment you made. And a conversion between two of your own balances lands on both currency statements, once on the way out and once on the way in, so pulling both files into a single Xero account counts the same movement twice.

Xero's manual import is the documented fallback and it accepts CSV, OFX, QBO, QFX and QIF. It doesn't accept PDF, so a PDF statement has to be converted first, and the conversion is exactly where signs get flipped and fee columns get counted twice. Nothing in the import recomputes a running balance, and nothing confirms the export you started from covered the whole period, so the checking is left to whoever is reconciling three weeks later.

• Import a CSV bank statementXero's manual fallback, the file formats it accepts, and the fields it expects to find.

Closing the part the connection leaves open

However the gap opened, it's the same shape each time: Wise has the transactions, the statement has the transactions, and Xero doesn't. StatementClear posts those statements into Xero through the Bank Feeds API, so the lines arrive the way native feed lines arrive, ready to reconcile rather than sitting behind an import screen as another file somebody has to remember to upload.

The checks are the product rather than the upload. Lines already sitting in the Xero account are skipped, which is what makes it safe to post over a period the native connection partly covered, the running balance is recomputed and checked against the statement's own before anything reaches the ledger, and inverted signs are caught on the way in rather than found later as a balance nobody can explain. The column mapping is set once per account and remembered, so the second month is the file and nothing else.

For a multi-currency Wise setup that means one feed per Xero bank account, which is how Xero treats currencies everywhere else anyway. Each balance's statement goes to its own feed and gets checked against its own running balance, and the currencies the native connection never carried stop being the ones that hold up the month.

• Bank Feeds API overviewThe interface a posted feed line arrives through, and why that isn't the same as an imported file.
• Find and remove duplicate bank statement linesXero's guidance for finding and removing duplicate statement lines once they're already in the account, which is the job worth not having.