This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
If you are a UK publisher paying authors after each royalty run, you probably know the routine. You finalize your bills, export them to Xero, and then log into your bank to process each payment individually. For a handful of authors, this is manageable. For 30 or more, it becomes an entire afternoon of copying sort codes, checking amounts, and waiting for authentication prompts. There has to be a better way.
There is. By combining Xero with Crezco, you can turn that stack of approved bills into a single batch payment processed through open banking. No bank portal. No manual transfers. No re-entering amounts you have already calculated.
What Crezco actually does
Crezco is a UK-based payment platform built on open banking, the infrastructure that lets authorized third parties initiate payments directly from your bank account. Instead of logging into your bank and typing in each transfer, Crezco reads your outstanding bills in Xero and lets you pay them all at once.
The important distinction is that Crezco is not a wallet or a money transfer service. It connects directly to your bank through the open banking framework regulated by the FCA. Your funds never sit in a third-party account. They move straight from your bank to your authors’ accounts in a single step.
For publishers, this means you can process Crezco bulk payments for all your authors in the time it takes to approve one batch. No more toggling between browser tabs or worrying about mistyped account numbers.
The full payment pipeline
Here is how the workflow fits together from start to finish. Once you understand the chain, you will see that most of the manual work disappears.
Step 1: Generate bills in your royalty software. After completing your royalty run, generate one bill per rights holder. The bill amount is calculated automatically based on the net total of each rights holder’s statement of account balances, including any advances or adjustments carried over from previous periods.
Step 2: Export bills as a CSV. Download all bills as a single CSV file. You will have options to exclude rights holders whose payment status is set to “paused,” so you are not accidentally creating bills for authors on hold.
Step 3: Import the CSV into Xero. Upload the CSV under Business > Bills to Pay > Import. Xero matches each row to a supplier contact by name and creates the corresponding bills. This is why keeping contact names synchronized between your royalty software and Xero is critical. The names must match exactly.
Step 4: Connect Crezco to Xero. If you have not already, link your Crezco account to Xero. Crezco will pull in all your unpaid bills automatically.
Step 5: Approve and pay the batch. In Crezco, select the bills you want to pay, review the batch, and authorize the payment. Open banking handles the rest. The payments go out directly from your bank account, and Crezco marks the bills as paid in Xero.
That last step is where the real magic happens. Because Crezco talks to both your bank and Xero through APIs, reconciliation happens automatically. When the payments clear, they show up as matched transactions in Xero without you lifting a finger.
Why open banking beats manual transfers
The benefits of this approach go beyond saving time, though the time savings alone are significant.
No bank login required. You authorize the payment through Crezco’s open banking connection, which means you are not logging into your bank’s web portal at all. This eliminates the friction of multi-factor authentication prompts, session timeouts, and clunky bank interfaces that were never designed for batch processing.
Automatic reconciliation in Xero. Because Crezco updates the bill status in Xero when payments clear, you do not have to manually match bank transactions to bills. Your books stay accurate without the usual end-of-month scramble.
Fewer errors. The payment amounts flow from your royalty calculations through the CSV into Xero and then to Crezco without anyone retyping a number. The chain of data is unbroken, which means the amount your author receives is exactly what your royalty run calculated.
Lower costs. Most open banking payments in the UK are free or very low cost compared to BACS bureau services or international wires. For publishers processing dozens of payments each quarter, the savings add up quickly.
Handling international authors with Wise Business
Crezco works brilliantly for UK-based authors with domestic bank accounts. But if you publish international authors, you will need a solution for cross-border payments where open banking does not reach.
Wise Business is the strongest option here. You can upload a CSV of international recipients and amounts, and Wise handles the currency conversion at the mid-market rate with transparent fees typically between 0.5% and 1.5%. For a $500 payment to an overseas author, that might cost $5 in fees versus $30 or more through a traditional bank wire.
A practical approach is to split your bills CSV into two groups: UK authors paid through the Crezco and Xero pipeline, and international authors paid through Wise Business. The download options in your royalty software make this straightforward. You can learn more about bulk payment strategies in our dedicated post on the topic.
Setting up Royalties HQ for this workflow
If you are using Royalties HQ, the bills CSV is already formatted for Xero import out of the box. Each rights holder gets one bill per royalty run, and the CSV includes one row per bill with the contact name, amount, and reference details Xero needs.
The key setup step is making sure each rights holder’s “Xero Contact Name” field in Royalties HQ matches their supplier contact name in Xero exactly. This is a requirement of Xero’s CSV import feature, which matches on name rather than account code. Get the names right once and every future import will work without manual intervention. You can find the full details in our bills documentation.
Once your names are synchronized, the entire flow from royalty run to paid authors takes minutes rather than hours. If you are evaluating how this fits into a broader royalty workflow, download our free guide for a complete look at modern royalty management.
Making it part of your routine
The best payment workflows are the ones you do not have to think about. Set a consistent schedule tied to your royalty periods. The day after you finalize a royalty run, export the bills, import them into Xero, and run the Crezco batch. It becomes a ten-minute checklist instead of a half-day project.
For a deeper look at how Xero fits into the broader royalty picture, read our Xero royalty integration guide. And if you are still weighing up royalty software options, our complete guide to royalty management covers the full landscape of tools and workflows available to publishers today.
Crezco bulk payments through Xero give UK publishers something that used to require expensive BACS bureau software or tedious manual banking: fast, accurate, batch author payments with automatic reconciliation. The open banking infrastructure is already there. The CSV export from your royalty software plugs straight into it. All you need to do is connect the pieces.