How to: Post a reversing journal in Xero

This story is over

If you have forgotten to set Auto Reverse on a journal, or perhaps you later decide you would like to reverse a journal, you can save time by using the reversal function rather than typing it all out again on a separate journal.

This feature is very useful for posting accruals, prepayments and deferred income when preparing management accounts.

Firstly, we need to find the original journal. To do this, click Adviser on your banner at the top, then drop down to Manage Journals. Once in manage journals, you will be defaulted to the All tab which you can either find the journal here or alternatively click into Posted and find the original journal.

If you have a really long list of journals and the journal you’re looking for doesn’t have the most recent date, you can use the Search function on the top right. Search lets you filter for all or just part of the narrative and you can also select between date ranges to make it easier.

Now we’ve found and opened the original journal, click Journal Options at the top right and drop down to select Reverse.

This will automatically move your debits and credits to the opposite sides of the original journal and amend your narrative to include ‘reversal of …’, making it easier in the future to find the new journal in your manage journal listing.

Enter the date you wish the reversing journal to be posted into your Xero. We can ignore the box saying ‘auto reversing date’ as this is what we are currently doing; otherwise it will add what we are reversing back into Xero.

If for any reason you need to amend the amounts just in the reversing journal, you can amend these before posting along with the narrative, nominal account, VAT rate, region (or the bespoke tracking name(s) you gave) etc.

You can now post this reversing journal into Xero.

Now the journal has been posted, if we have another look in Adviser and then drop down to Manage Journals, we should now see the prepayment reversal journal listed.

That’s how nice and easy it is to post a reversing journal in Xero, All done.

If you would like further information please email [email protected]