Shopify Integration by Xero
The official Shopify integration by Xero is designed to automate the syncing of daily sales summaries from your Shopify store into Xero, reducing manual data entry and streamlining bookkeeping for ecommerce businesses. It captures sales, discounts, shipping, refunds, gift card payments, and fees, and helps with tax compliance by grouping transactions by tax rate.
This provides:
Time-saving automation: Automatically syncs daily sales data, minimizing manual bookkeeping and reducing errors.
Cash flow tracking: Provides up-to-date visibility of sales, fees, and cash flow in Xero’s dashboard.
Easy reconciliation: Groups transactions by payment gateway and offers clearing accounts for pending payments, making reconciliation straightforward.
Yet there are limitations.
No inventory sync: The integration does not sync inventory or cost of goods sold (COGS) data from Shopify to Xero, which can be a significant drawback for businesses needing detailed inventory tracking.
No per-transaction invoices: It only syncs daily summaries, not individual invoices for each order, and does not import customer-level details.
Limited multi-store and multi-currency support: You cannot connect multiple Shopify stores to a single Xero account, and stores/accounts with different currencies are not supported.
Support issues: Some users report slow or limited support, as assistance is primarily available through Xero’s forums.
Connecting Shopify to an inventory management program.
Yet If you connect your Shopify sales to an inventory management system that then feeds to Xero then you can fill the gaps left by the standard integration. For one thing you would have live accurate COGS as under FIFO rules the actual cost of the unit at its purchase price is assigned to that actual unit sold. In Xero this would show in you cost of goods sold at point of delivery and credit that actual stock figure from inventory giving you an actual balance sheet.
As a byproduct, you will have accurate stock figures that can be pushed up to your Shopify store and you can automate tasks such as assemblies or backorders if stock runs out so you can still take the order. On the flip side, restock and refunds are also captured in Cin7 Core and finances reflected in Xero. Even if you use daily consolidation so you don’t have individual contacts clogging up your Xero tenant, the refund will still be linked to that line on the daily consolidation so you can trace that back to its original Shopify order.
Cin7 Core also gives you a wider palette as you can have multiple channels, such as Ebay, Amazon as well as Shopify or point of sale all migrating information to Xero at the same time. Cin7 Core also allows for different exchange rates coming from Xero to support multiple Shopify stores.
