Intercompany settlement
This page is for either organisation in a trading pair — both sides see the same balance from their own end, and settling it affects both sets of books at once. Intercompany settlement is how the money behind ownership flips reaches your accounting system.
This is not the same feature as a settlement period. Intercompany settlement is a live, running balance between two trading organisations that posts real documents to Xero; a settlement period is the facility operator's own internal record over a date range, and it never reaches Xero — see operator settlement periods.
What it nets
Yessort keeps one running balance per trading partner: everything unsettled between your organisation and theirs, netted to a single figure with a direction. Both kinds of ownership flip go into it — the ones created by a cross-organisation transfer, and the ones created by a cross-organisation sale where no transfer document exists at all. If your balance is bigger than the transfers you can account for, sales drawn from that partner's stock are the reason.
The count of what's outstanding renders as a number followed by unsettled charges, alongside the date of the oldest one. It mixes transfer-driven and sale-driven charges together, and there's no way on that screen to tell how many of each you have.
What settling produces
Settling a partner nets every outstanding charge in both directions and looks at the total for the pair as a whole. Three things can happen.
If the total comes out in the seller's favour, Yessort posts a sales invoice on the seller's books and a matching bill on the buyer's. If the total runs the other way — because releases and returns outweigh the charges — Yessort posts a credit-note pair instead: a credit note on one side and a supplier credit on the other, both for a positive amount. If the total nets to zero, nothing is posted at all; the charges are simply marked as settled and disappear from the balance.
The decision is made on the pair's total, never line by line, so an intercompany settlement run that produces an invoice can still contain individual charges pointing the other way. The screen's own description promises a sales invoice and a bill and doesn't mention the credit-note outcome, so don't read it as the only thing that can happen.
How often it happens
Intercompany settlement does not run monthly. A background job runs once a day, at 01:00 UTC, and checks every partner pair with something outstanding against that pair's own cadence. A pair set to daily settles on every run. A pair set to weekly settles on Mondays. A pair set to monthly settles on the 1st. A pair with no cadence set is treated as monthly, which is what every pair starts out as.
Two things about this are easy to get wrong. The cadence is judged against the calendar in UTC, not against when that pair last settled — so switching a pair to weekly on a Tuesday means waiting until the following Monday, not seven days. And nothing is ever overdue: if a run is missed, the balance simply keeps growing until the next matching calendar day comes round.
You can change the cadence yourself, per partner, from the intercompany settlement screen. It's the only thing about a trading relationship you can change in Yessort.
Settle now settles early
Settle now is a real button on each partner's card, and what it does is settle that pair ahead of its cadence. It is not what causes intercompany settlement to happen — that happens anyway, on the schedule above. Use it when you want the documents in Xero now rather than at the next calendar boundary. On a monthly pair that can save you most of a month; even on a daily pair it can save you up to 24 hours.
Unpriced sales are counted, not valued
A cross-organisation sale that Yessort couldn't price is recorded but left without a value. On the partner's card these appear as a count of items awaiting an intercompany price, and that's all you'll ever see of them: they're excluded from the money figure entirely, so a partner can carry real unsettled trade while the balance reads zero. They do pull the "since" date back, because the oldest outstanding item includes them.
A partner whose only outstanding items are unpriced ones still gets a card, with Settle now disabled — there is genuinely nothing to settle until a price exists. Resolving it means making sure an intercompany price can be found for that item between those two organisations, and that both organisations book in the same currency.
The posting stream has to be on
Intercompany settlement writes to Xero through a posting stream called Intercompany, in each organisation's accounting settings, and it is switched off by default on a newly connected Xero account. Until it's on, the pair is skipped.
It's skipped for both sides together. A pair is only settled if both organisations are ready to post — the right connection, the right account codes and the Intercompany stream switched on. If either side isn't, nothing is posted, nothing is marked as settled, and the balance keeps accruing for both of them. One organisation leaving that switch off quietly stops intercompany settlement for every partner it trades with, not just for itself. If you use Settle now and get a warning about posting being switched off or accounting not being configured, that's what it means, and it may be the other organisation's settings at fault rather than yours.
The balance is per organisation, not across them
The intercompany settlement screen only works when you have a single organisation selected. Viewing across All organisations, it always shows a card titled Nothing outstanding — regardless of what any of your organisations actually owe or are owed. This isn't a report that nothing is outstanding; it's the screen declining to answer. Pick one organisation to see its real balances.
For the steps, see settle with a trading partner.