Hi there, I’m Nick Roberts, I am an accountant who has been working in public practice for the last 12 years. 

I was an early adopter of Xero in 2007, and have been working with this platform  (as well as other accounting systems since). I would like to use my expertise to help people with their use of Xero and other accounting software solutions.

For this blog post I will be covering how to edit an already reconciled transaction. 

So you have been busy reconciling transactions and realise that you have coded transactions to the wrong place, or you are checking your outstanding receivables and notice that an invoice is missing a payment attached to it.

You think to yourself how do I fix this, or even find where the payment has been incorrectly reconciled to. Don’t worry I have you covered.  

The first thing I will cover is how to find and edit a transaction that you have just reconciled.   

 Editing a Transaction You Have Just Reconciled  

How to edit a Spend Money or Receive Money Transaction

So you are about to reconcile a transaction in the bank reconciliation screen as below; 

As soon as you reconcile you work out it should have been coded somewhere else, in this example entertainment rather than general expenses. 

The easiest way to edit this transaction soon after you have entered it is to find it in the account transactions tab.  

Once you have found the transaction it would  normally be in the first 5-6 transactions at the top of this list.  You click on the blue name and this will take you to the screen where you can edit the transaction. 

 Click on Options edit transaction and click in the account field;

In this example you would change it to Entertainment

How To Edit A Payment To An Invoice or Bill

The process to edit a payment  to an Invoice or Bill is the same as above with a couple of additional steps. 

Once you are in transaction payment screen, you click on options then remove & redo. 

Once you have clicked remove and do, this unhooks the payment from the invoice or bill, allowing it to be reconciled again in the bank reconciliation screen. 

Updating Past Transactions

There are two ways that you can search for past transactions that you need to edit, via the account transactions search function or the global search function. 

 Account Transactions Search Function: 

This Search function can be accessed  in the account transactions tab; 

The search function has the following options to search by; 

1. Description or Contact name 
2. Amount (either specific amount or a range)  
3. Date (Either a specific date or a range)

In this example I am going to search for Port & Phillip Freight on the 5th of July 2019.

You can then edit this transaction as described How To Edit A Payment To An Invoice or Bill section.

Searching through account transactions is a very quick and easy way to find and edit transactions. However it is only limited to the bank account selected so if you have multiple bank accounts and are unsure what account the transaction was in, it can be limiting. 

Luckily Xero has a global search function which will search the entirety of your xero file for the information. 

Global Search Function

The global search function can be accessed from the top right hand corner of the Xero Dashboard. 

This search function only allows you to search by one option of Contact / Description / Amount / Date / Account Code. 

It is best used when you have multiple bank accounts and need to find a specific contact or amount across these. 

In this example I am going to search for Port & Phillip Freight and select the one that is dated the 5th of July 2019. 

You can then edit this transaction as described How To Edit A Payment To An Invoice or Bill section.

If you need to bulk update a number of payments, there is a function in Xero that allows you to do this, but it requires you to have the adviser role in Xero, this is normally used only by your accountant or financial adviser. 

If you need to do this please get in touch and I can help you with this. 

Thank you for your time in reading this, if you have any questions or suggestions for future posts please contact me at nick@zero-tohero.com or on 022 405 9312. 

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