Accountancy software integrations

[luke]

Linking Breww to your accountancy platform

Breww is integrated with a number of accountancy platforms. All integrations work in roughly the same way and all the information on this page applies to them all, unless otherwise stated.

• Xero
• QuickBooks Online
• Sage Business Cloud
• Clear Books
• Sage 50 (desktop-based)
• Clear Books
• KashFlow
• Visma eAccounting

Connecting Breww to your provider

The first step is to grant Breww access to your account with your provider. When this is first done, nothing will sync initially and you’ll get a chance to configure how you’d like the integration to work before enabling syncing. To connect, navigate to our Integrations > Accountancy page and then click the Connect to my accountancy software button.

Next, you should see a connect button for each of the different platforms, click on the one you’d like to set up (note Breww can only be linked to a single platform at once and to change platforms, you’ll need to contact us). The next steps vary slightly between the platforms (we redirect you to your provider for you to authorise our access) just follow the steps shown on screen and we’ll be authorised and you’ll be back to Breww in a moment.

How does data flow between Breww and my accountancy software?

Breww	Accountancy software	Details
Invoiced orders	Invoices	Orders invoiced in Breww are uploaded. If they are then voided in Breww, they are voided with your provider as well.
Credit notes	Credit notes	Credit notes are uploaded.
Payments	Payments	Payments are uploaded and are also downloaded from your provider when an uploaded invoice is paid.
Customers	Customers/Contacts	Customers/contacts can be downloaded, and Breww will update them with your provider when updated in Breww.
Inventory receipts	Bills/Purchases	When an Inventory Receipt in Breww has been marked as “Invoiced by Supplier”, this will be uploaded to your accountancy provider as a bill.

Order flow

graph TD A[Draft order] --> B[Confirmed order] B --> C[Invoiced order] C --> U(Uploaded to accountancy software) C --> P[Payments & refunds] P --> U U --> P P --> C style U fill:#15c377,color:#fff

Bill (purchase) flow

graph TD A["Purchase order (optional)"] --> B[Inventory receipt 'Draft'] B --> C[Inventory receipt 'Added to Stock'] C --> D[Inventory receipt 'Invoiced by Supplier'] D --> U(Uploaded to accountancy software) style U fill:#15c377,color:#fff

Mapping and downloading customers

When you raise an invoice in Breww, we will push this to your accountancy provider. At this point, Breww will create a customer in your accountancy provider to attach the invoice to. When this customer has subsequent invoices, Breww will add these to the same accountancy provider customer that it created the first time. This is all well and good if this is a brand-new customer that doesn’t already exist in your accounting software, prior to you joining Breww, however, if any of your customers already exist in your accountancy software and Breww, you’ll want to “map” them together so that Breww knows this customer already exists in your accountancy provider and puts the orders against the right customer in your accountancy provider.

If you have any customers in your accountancy provider already that are the same as existing customers in Breww (or you’d like them in Breww, and they’re only in your provider), click the Tools tab, then the Map and download customers button. You’ll be presented with a list of your customers in the accountancy software on the left, and from the right, you can choose the corresponding customer in Breww. You can also choose “Create as new customer in Breww” which will cause the customer to be downloaded from the accountancy provider to Breww and mapped. Make sure you click the Sync customers button after each page of changes and before navigating to a different page, or the customers on the previous page will not be saved.

There is also a helpful Auto allocation button to get Breww to automatically attempt to map your Breww customers to those in your accountancy provider. We do this with an exact match on the name of the customer.

Chart of accounts (nominal codes)

From the Accounts (nominal codes) tab, use the Download accounts button and choose the accounts that you’d like Breww to be able to use. Once the accounts have been downloaded, you can map your default sales and default bank accounts (in the Settings tab). If you wish for payments of different methods to go into different accounts in your accountancy provider you can set these in the settings here too. If you don’t, just leave them blank.

For even more fine-grain control, you can also set an account on any customer type in Breww (from the customer type list screen) for their sales to go into (rather than the default). Likewise, you can do the same for any product within Breww if you prefer to split sales in this way. Finally, there is a config option to configure which account should take precedence in a conflict. If you’re not sure what this all means, don’t worry about these options.

Sync settings

You can configure options surrounding your sync from here, including which types of data should be synced (customers, invoices & payments). We will never download an invoice from your accountancy provider, we’ll only ever upload invoices from Breww to the accountancy provider. For any of “our” invoices, we will sync payments relating to them both ways - so if you add a payment in Breww, we’ll upload it for you and if you add a payment in your accountancy provider we’ll download this back to Breww.

Enable syncing

This is the main toggle to set if you’d like Breww to sync with your accountancy provider. This will be disabled by default so you have a chance to map your customers, chart of accounts and configure the service to how you’d like it to work. When you’re ready, simply enable the sync. Once enabled, data will be synced to your accountancy provider in the background. We don’t upload orders to your accountancy provider until they have been invoiced in Breww.

FAQ

How often does data sync?

Data should sync within 15 minutes of triggering an update on either platform.

How do I disconnect my Breww account from my accountancy provider?

To disconnect, simply go to your accountancy settings page and click the Disconnect tab, then click the Disconnect button. This should only be used if you want to permanently disconnect Breww from your account platform (for example, if you’re migrating to a different accounting platform).

If you just want to temporarily prevent syncing, you should disable syncing instead by using the button in the Settings tab.

An order I’ve invoiced hasn’t appeared in my accountancy provider, what do I do?

We have a full guide on this topic available at:

Why haven't some of my invoices/other documents/payments appeared in my accounting software?

Check the upload status and “sync messages” We’d advise taking a look at your accounting configuration settings in Breww (Integrations → Accountancy → View settings). From here you can check on the upload statuses of your invoices/credit notes/etc and whether any “sync messages” have been generated for documents that have failed to upload. These messages can be found in the tab named “Sync messages”. These messages should provide the answer as to why specific items haven’t been uploaded, which…

Why has Breww created a customer in my accountancy software with a number after their name?

Why does Breww create customers in my accounting software with numbers after their name?

When a customer is created in Breww, Breww will attempt to create that customer in your accounting software and map to them. If there is already a customer in your accounting software with the same name, and your accountancy software enforces unique names, then Breww will have to create a unique name for them. This is done by adding a reference number to the end of the customer’s name. If you didn’t map your existing Breww customers to your existing accountancy software customers after setting …

Will Breww download/import invoices that I create directly in my accounting software

No, never. Invoices are a one-way sync from Breww to your accounting platform. Breww only ever pushes invoices to Breww and will never pull invoices into Breww that were created in your accounting software.

We recommend not creating invoices manually in your accounting software ever (even if they’re for a non-beer product or something else not currently tracked in Breww). These should be created in Breww, just like any other invoice. This greatly simplifies a number of processes behind the scenes and reduces the chances of these causing problems (such as conflicting invoice numbers, duplicate customers, etc).

For invoices that Breww uploaded to your accounting platform initially, the payments are a two-way sync. As a general rule we suggest, where possible, managing payments directly in Breww and letting Breww inform your accounting software, however, if you do add payments to an invoice in your accounting software, Breww will download this information into Breww for you. This is helpful if you create payments from a bank feed/reconciliation process.

[hazel-meehan]

Is there a possibility that Purchase Orders could be synchronised with accountancy software? This is where billing and invoicing is actually done. At the moment we are having to create a PO in Xero then separately create the inventory receipt in Breww.

On the invoicing side the invoices are created in Breww then flow through to accountancy software where the payments are reconciled. In the same manner it would be better if the money side of things was dealt with in Xero rather than Breww as it is our finance team who work in that system. The inventory receipt would still remain in Breww for stock control purposes.

[max]

Hi Hazel! We can definitely look at Breww uploading POs to our accountancy integrations - I know both Xero and Quickbooks support this, so it would be possible. However, Breww does already have the ability to upload Inventory receipts as “Bills” in Xero - which sounds like it might do what you’re looking for here.

After you’ve added an inventory receipt to stock in Breww, you can then mark it as “Invoiced by supplier”, which will upload it to Xero as a “Bill”. Your accountants will be able to configure the Charts of accounts (Nominal codes) which are associated with the stock items, too, just like with products and customers. Then the bill is in Xero, ready for your accounting team to pay and reconcile against.

Does this cover what you would be looking for?

[hazel-meehan]

This is slightly different from my understanding of how Xero works for bills, or perhaps the way we use it.

In Xero we raise a ‘bill’ when we receive the invoice for the supplier, which is then approved to confirm the goods/services are relevant/correct etc. When the payment is made it then gets reconciled against that bill. Sometimes that bill is raised before goods are receipted and some on receipt so it wouldn’t work to use the inventory receipt feature as the driver for creating the bill. Aso the people who ‘add to stock’ the inventory receipt are not the recipients of the invoice (that goes to our accountancy people). These users are goods in / warehouse / production staff. For this reason I can’t see how the inventory receipt could or should be used to drive the bills feature. Or am I missing something?

[max]

We agree associating inventory receipts with “Bills” in Xero definitely isn’t a perfect one-to-one relationship. As you’ve pointed out, a bill in Xero is actually a purchase invoice, rather than a receipt of goods. However, as Breww doesn’t currently support purchase invoices, we had the choice of either driving the bill upload in Xero (and other accountancy integrations) either from a purchase order or an inventory receipt.

In our experience (although I totally accept this won’t always be the case!), suppliers tend to invoice per delivery, rather than per purchase order. For example, if a purchase order is fulfilled over two deliveries, we’ve found they tend to invoice twice, once for the goods on the first delivery and again for the goods on the next, rather than a single invoice covering both deliveries. So that’s why we chose to upload inventory receipts as bills rather than purchase orders.

The idea behind the three inventory receipt statuses (Draft, Added to Stock, Invoiced by Supplier) is then to allow the production and warehouse staff to simply be able to record the delivery as “Added to Stock” before the finance team can move it on to “Invoiced by Supplier” and store the invoice against the inventory receipt once the invoice has been received. The purchase invoice is then created in your accountancy software, ready to be reconciled against the payment.

There’s definitely always scope for improvement, so we can always look at adding more flexibility in how you’d like the flow to work - but I hope that explains why we’ve set it up the way we have so far! The ideal solution might be that Breww fully supports purchase invoices as well, which can be associated with inventory receipts/purchase orders and then Breww can upload them to Xero - it would be interesting to get people’s thoughts on this! We have a feature request here which is aimed at solving the same situation:

Selective Invoice Receipting for Inventory Receipts

We have a need for selective invoice receipting for two main reasons, 1. Suppliers with multiple warehouses. 2 Consignment stock Example 1. We put a PO in for 3 x A 3 x B 3 x C We receive all items today. Tomorrow we receive an invoice for 2 x A 1 x B We receive a second incoice for 1 x A 3 x C and a third invoice for 2 x B All items shipped the same day from the same company and arrived the same time but had an invoice from each warehouse due to supply shortages. Example 2. We …