1. Before you start

Please ensure you have:

You may check your Xero permissions by going to Settings in the top left corner, then clicking General Settings and then Users. If you do not have the relevant permissions, you will not be able to see the options to adjust pay. The administrator of your Xero account may add this for you.

You will need to have your employee information set up in either Deputy or Xero.

If your employee information is already in Xero

Ensure your employees are set up in Xero under the Payroll> Employees section. This includes:

• Personal details
• Employment information
• Taxes

Before you can export timesheets, employees will also need to be assigned Wage/Salary items and a Pay frequency in Xero. These are not essential right now and we will cover these later in the process.

Note: if your employees are in Xero but not yet Deputy, then when you connect and sync with Deputy then new employees to Deputy will be automatically sent an invitation to join Deputy at the email address you have entered in Xero. If you wish to avoid this scenario so that you can set up your Deputy account first and then invite your team to join Deputy later, please read this help article.

If your employee information is already in Deputy

If you have created your employees in Deputy already you will be able to sync to Xero once you connect. The following information about employees can be synced from Deputy to Xero:

Read more at What data is synced between Xero and Deputy? and Is the sync 2-way?

About Xero pay items

If you have designated Xero as the source of truth for pay rate information, you will have pay items set up in Xero. Pay items are rules or rates on how an employee should be paid at certain times or under certain conditions. Once you've created pay items you can assign them under Salary and Wages section on an employee's Pay Template.

An employee can have multiple Pay Items assigned to them, which allows them to be paid different rates according to different work conditions e.g. working different areas or hours.

Note: if you connect Xero to Deputy and decide to assign Xero pay rates to your team members then you will not be able to use Deputy to manage your team member's leave entitlements as it will be assumed that you will manage leave within Xero along with the pay rates.

Creating Xero pay items

1. Click Settings from the dropdown menu under your organisation name on the top left of the screen.

2. Select Payroll Settings.

3. On the Pay Items tab, you can create a new pay item by clicking Add.

 4. Select an earning category from the list.

Note: If you are syncing to Deputy you can only set the earnings category to one of these:

• Regular Earnings
• Overtime Earnings
• Allowance

5. You will then see a popup for the selected earning Category that lets you assign the rate:

Xero will assign rates based on their name. In its more basic form, this refers to:

• Weekday (If you name a rate "Weekday Hours" for example, the system will apply it  hours worked from Monday to Friday)
• Saturday (Saturday can be Sat or Saturday)
• Sunday (Sunday may be Sun or Sunday)
• Public Holiday rates (Public Holiday should be PH).

If this naming scheme is not used, the system will apply the employee's nominated Wages & Salary item as the default.

If you require more complex rates than the above (like night rates or overtime, for example) please reach out to one of our Support team.

Assigning Xero pay items to employees

After creating your pay items, you'll need to assign them to your employees.

1. Click Payroll and select Employees then click on the name of the employee you wish to edit.

2. Click on the Pay template tab. The Pay template is a list of rates an employee can possibly be paid. You should not have more rates applied to an employee than necessary. To add one of your created pay items to an employee, please click + Earnings. 

3. Select an earnings line and enter the value of the rate per hour the employee will be paid. We recommend setting the number of hours as 0, however, regardless of the number set, it will be overwritten upon timesheet export for each pay run.

After adding the rate and any other earnings lines applicable to the employee, please click Save at the bottom of your screen.

4. You will also need to select a pay frequency for the employee. While still in the employee's profile, select the Employment tab and select a pay frequency from the dropdown.

On the same page, you can assign a default pay item for the employee by clicking on Change regular earnings.

5. Select the default pay item for regular earnings. If they are an hourly worker then set the option to Hourly Rate and enter a default value the employee will be paid per hour.

Please ensure that in the section Standard hours per week you set the hours as 0 and click confirm.

Note: If you add any hours here, they will be included on the employee's pay template automatically and then any hours exported in the timesheet export from Deputy will be added to these hours, effectively incorrectly overpaying your employee.

If you haven't already, you will need to connect your Deputy account to your Xero account.

Connections to any payroll provider including Xero are made from a Deputy Location.

Note: if your employees are in Xero but not yet Deputy, then when you connect and sync with Deputy then new employees to Deputy will be automatically sent an invitation to join Deputy at the email address you have entered in Xero. If you wish to avoid this scenario so that you can set up your Deputy account first and then invite your team to join Deputy later, please read this help article.

1. In Deputy, open the drop-down menu under your name on the top right-hand side of the screen, then click on the link to access Integrations.

2. Click on Xero.

3. Click Connect add-on

4. Note that the name of your organisation in Xero that Deputy is trying to connect to will appear.

Click Allow access.

Note: if you have multiple business accounts in Xero to choose from you may see a different pop-up at this stage and you will be asked to choose which Xero organisation from the dropdown menu you wish to connect to this Deputy Location. We do not recommend connecting different Xero accounts to one single Deputy account as this can create authentication issues.

5. You will then be taken back to the Xero integration page in Deputy. You will notice that the locations that are connected to Xero will show up in the Connected location list. This means that you can share data between Xero and Deputy (and vice versa) and can click on Configure to set up the integration options.

You can also continue to connect other locations in the same way if required.

Once you have connected your Deputy location(s) to Xero there are additional connection settings you need to review and decide whether to turn them on or off according to your requirements:

Auto sync employees

Toggling ON Auto sync employees will sync your Xero and Deputy employees. This means that any employee information in Xero will be added in Deputy and vice versa.

• Employees are matched between Xero and Deputy based on their full name and email address.
• If the employee in Xero is not found in Deputy (using email address as the match), then an invite to join Deputy will be sent to their email address when you Autosync employees.
• If an employee does not have an email address, please set their Timesheet Export Code as their full name.
• If there is an inconsistency in data between Xero and Deputy, Deputy will be the source of truth and will overwrite Xero.
• Leave balances will also sync between Deputy and Xero.

For more detail on using Auto sync employees please read our FAQ.

Xero pay templates

You can toggle ON Xero pay templates only once Auto Sync Employees has been toggled on. This will allow you to set Xero to the source of truth for pay templates and pay rates. We recommend turning this on and setting up pay rates within Xero. 

For more detail on using Xero Pay Templates please read our FAQ.

You can activate other Xero extensions as detailed in Configuring Deputy extensions for Xero integrations. (Not all extensions listed in this article are available for Xero UK.)

Don't forget to click Save after configuring your Xero integration.

• By default, Deputy is the source of truth for pay rate information, but if you have Xero Pay Templates toggled ON then Xero will be the source of truth for pay rates.
• Employee information between Xero and Deputy will automatically be synced between every 15 minutes if you have toggled on Auto sync employees.  
• After the initial sync between Deputy and Xero, pay rates can only be synced manually by triggering a Sync with Xero. 

1. In Deputy, click on the People tab, select the employees you wish to sync by ticking the check boxes next to their names.

2. Click on Bulk actions and select Sync with Xero.

3. Tick the check box to refresh the mapping of Team members between Deputy and Xero, then click Sync Team member.

This action will sync both the employee data and pay rates for the selected team members.

If the sync is successful you will receive a message such as shown below

On the People page, the Xero logo will be shown in the Pay rate column next to the employees that have synced pay information from Xero. If the Pay rate column is not displayed on the People page just select it from the Display drop down menu.

If you don't see Xero Payroll next to your employees names, first make sure Auto sync employees and Xero pay templates are toggled on in the Payroll tab. Then, trigger an update by clicking Sync with Xero under the bulk actions list in the People tab as shown above but instead of selecting all employees, just select one or two at time and see if you can get smaller batches to sync successfully. If one employee is not set up correctly then it may cause the sync for all employees to fail so using smaller batches to sync may isolate the problematic employee record. For more troubleshooting options, check out Troubleshooting Common Xero Errors.

4. Select Xero Payroll from the drop-down list and you should see that you are connected to your Xero organisation. 

5. Tick the check box if you want the exported timesheets to be automatically approved in Xero. If you don't check this option, timesheets will have to be approved again in Xero.

6. Click Export.

A message as shown below will be displayed to verify that the export was successful.

If you are having trouble exporting your timesheets check out our Troubleshooting Common Xero Export Errors page.

If you need to update or correct an exported timesheet you will need to set the previously exported timesheet to "Draft" in Xero and then export it again otherwise you will get an error similar to below:

Leave can be exported as timesheets, however, we need to ensure the following:

If you are using Tracking Codes in Xero, you will need to make sure that your Area Export Codes in Deputy match your Xero tracking codes.