This article is part of our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.
You have just finished a royalty run. Bills are calculated for every rights holder, and now you need to get those numbers into Xero so you can pay your authors. If your current process involves re-typing each bill amount into Xero manually, you are spending hours on work that should take minutes. Worse, every manual keystroke is a chance for error.
The good news is that royalty software and Xero can work together smoothly, even without a direct API connection. The key is a structured CSV workflow that treats your royalty bills as Xero-ready supplier bills from the start.
Why double-entry is the real problem
Most publishers track royalties in one system and accounting in another. That is perfectly reasonable. Royalty software handles the complex allocation logic (tiered rates, reserves, advances, multi-currency conversions) while Xero handles the books. The problem comes at the handoff.
Without integration, someone on your team has to manually create a bill in Xero for each rights holder after every royalty run. For a publisher with 30 authors paid quarterly, that is 120 bills a year typed by hand. Double-entry does not just waste time. It introduces discrepancies between what your royalty software says you owe and what your accounting software records. When those numbers drift apart, reconciliation becomes a forensic exercise.
Setting up rights holders as suppliers in Xero
Before you can import royalty bills into Xero, your rights holders need to exist as contacts. In Xero, authors and other rights holders should be set up as suppliers (not customers), because you are paying them, not invoicing them.
For each rights holder, create a supplier contact in Xero with these details:
- Contact name that exactly matches the name in your royalty software (this is critical for CSV imports)
- Default account code mapped to your royalties expense account
- Payment details including bank account or payment method information
- Tax settings appropriate for each rights holder’s tax status
Getting the contact names right is the single most important step. When you import bills via CSV, Xero matches each bill to a supplier by name. If “Jane Smith” in your royalty software is listed as “J. Smith” in Xero, the import will fail for that row.
Structuring your chart of accounts
A clean chart of accounts makes royalty payments easy to track and report on. Here is a straightforward structure that works well for most publishers:
Create a dedicated royalties expense account. Something like “6100 - Royalties Payable” under your cost of goods sold or direct costs category. Every royalty bill imported from your CSV should post to this account.
Consider sub-accounts for granularity. If you publish across multiple imprints or divisions, you might want separate expense accounts for each. This lets you run profit and loss reports by imprint without extra filtering.
Use a separate bank account for royalty payments. If you have followed our advice on setting up a separate royalty bank account, your Xero bank feed for that account will only contain royalty-related transactions. Reconciliation becomes almost automatic.
The CSV import workflow
Here is what the actual process looks like once everything is set up. After completing a royalty run in your software, you export your bills as a CSV file. This CSV contains one row per rights holder with the bill amount, contact name, and relevant details.
In Xero, you go to Business > Bills to Pay > Import and upload the CSV. Xero reads each row, matches it to the corresponding supplier contact, and creates a bill. Within seconds, you have all your royalty bills sitting in Xero as supplier bills ready for payment.
No retyping. No copy-paste errors. No toggling between screens. The numbers in your accounting software match your royalty software exactly, because they came from the same source file.
You can then approve the bills in batch and schedule payments through Xero’s payment tools, or process them through your bank’s batch payment system. If you want to download our free guide, it covers more detail on setting up financial workflows that connect your royalty and accounting systems.
Matching contacts between systems
The trickiest part of this workflow is keeping contact names synchronized between your royalty software and Xero. Here are some practical tips:
Establish a naming convention early. Decide whether you will use full legal names, pen names, or company names, and apply the rule consistently in both systems.
Audit the match regularly. Before each import, spot-check a few names to make sure nothing has drifted. A single character difference (an extra space, a missing middle initial) will cause a mismatch.
Handle new rights holders in both systems. When you sign a new author, add them as a supplier in Xero at the same time you create their profile in your royalty software. This prevents the scramble of setting up contacts mid-import.
How Royalties HQ handles this
Royalties HQ is designed with this Xero workflow in mind. When you create bills in a royalty run, the system generates one bill per rights holder based on their statements of account. The bill CSV download is formatted specifically for Xero’s bill import feature, so there is no reformatting or column mapping required.
Each rights holder in Royalties HQ has a dedicated Xero Contact Name field. As long as this field matches the supplier contact name in Xero exactly, the import works seamlessly. The system also handles payment status filtering, so rights holders with paused payments can be excluded from the export automatically.
Royalties HQ does not have a direct Xero API integration yet, but the team is exploring this for a future update. In the meantime, the CSV-based workflow is reliable, fast, and eliminates the double-entry problem entirely. A royalty run that used to require an afternoon of manual data entry can be reflected in your Xero accounts in under five minutes.
What this means for your month-end
When your royalty bills flow into Xero cleanly, month-end closes get faster. Your accounts payable balance accurately reflects what you owe to rights holders. Your expense reports show exactly how much you spent on royalties for the period. And if your accountant or auditor asks for supporting documentation, you can point to the royalty run in your software and the matching bills in Xero.
This is the real payoff of integration, even CSV-based integration. It is not just about saving time on data entry. It is about having a single version of the truth that spans both your royalty operations and your financial records.
For more on managing the financial side of royalties, read our Complete Guide to Royalty Management.