Operator settlement periods
This page is for the facility operator only. A settlement period is the operator's own record of how fairly stock losses were shared out across the brand tenants at its site, and brand tenants cannot see these records at all — not the list, not an individual period, not even one whose lines name them.
This is not the same feature as intercompany settlement, which nets a live balance between two trading organisations and posts real documents to Xero. A settlement period posts nothing anywhere. The two are reached by controls one character apart — Settlement, on the transfers page, is the intercompany balance; Settlements, in the sidebar, is this feature — so it's worth checking which one you're on.
What a period is
A settlement period is a date range you open over your own facility. You give it a start date, an end date and optionally a note, and Yessort works out the money at the moment you create it. From there it moves through three statuses: draft while you're reviewing it, finalised once you've locked the totals in, and paid once you've recorded that it's been settled between you and your tenants.
Those transitions only go one way. A finalised period can't be reopened, a paid period can't be changed, and there's no way to edit or remove an individual line. There's no delete or void either, and periods can't overlap for the same operator organisation — so the dates a wrong period covers can't be re-used by a corrected one. Check the dates before you select Create draft.
What a shrinkage-rounding line is
This is the whole point of the feature, and it's easier than it sounds.
When you count a location holding several organisations' stock, the variance you find has to be attributed to those organisations. When the variance and anything you attributed to a known cause are both whole numbers, as they normally are, the proportional split lands in whole units, so the physical count reconciles immediately and each tenant's ledger moves by a clean quantity. A fractional physical count, or a fractional attribution, carries its fraction through to one organisation's allocation instead. Either way, whole units are almost never anybody's exact share. If three tenants hold a shared item in an awkward ratio and eleven units are missing, somebody books four when their fair share was three and two-thirds, and somebody books three when theirs was three and a third. Nobody has been treated unfairly on purpose — it's just that stock comes in whole units and fair shares don't.
Over a period those fractions add up. A settlement period goes back over every commingled count you published in that date range, works out what each organisation's exact fractional share would have been, compares it to what they actually booked, and values the difference at that organisation's own weighted average cost. The result is one shrinkage-rounding line per organisation per count: a small money figure that trues up the residue the whole-unit split left behind.
Units you attributed to a known cause during the count are treated differently. They enter that organisation's fair share at face value — they were never in doubt — so they attract no rounding true-up at all. Only the remainder that was split proportionally can produce a line.
Two things follow from valuing it at each organisation's own cost. The lines aren't guaranteed to add up to zero. Where every organisation on a count carries the same unit cost and no residue is dropped, they do sum to zero exactly; where costs differ, or a residue falls under the cutoff, the difference is absorbed by you as the operator. And residues worth less than half a penny are dropped rather than written — half a penny in your organisation's own default currency, not necessarily sterling — so a count can legitimately produce no lines at all.
Reading the sign
Every line is signed, and the sign is operator-relative.
A positive figure means that organisation booked less loss than its exact share — it came out ahead on the rounding, so it owes you. A negative figure means it booked more loss than its share, so you owe it. It's the same convention throughout, on every line, whichever tenant it names.
In the Kind column you'll see the raw value shrinkage_rounding, underscore and all. That's the only kind of line Yessort writes here, so every line on every period reads that way.
This record never leaves Yessort
A settlement period records money. It does not post any.
Nothing about a period reaches Xero — not on creation, not on finalising, not on marking it paid. No invoice, no bill, no journal, no credit note. Nothing is charged to any tenant and no tenant is notified, at any stage. Finalising a period doesn't touch the ownership flips behind intercompany settlement either, and settling with a trading partner doesn't touch any period.
What you have is your own ledger of what the rounding cost each tenant over a stretch of time — a figure to take to them, invoice outside Yessort, or fold into whatever storage or handling arrangement you already have with them. Yessort's job here ends at telling you the number.
Organisations that get left out
Not every organisation on a count necessarily gets a line, and the ones that don't are left out quietly.
An organisation is skipped if it has never linked one of its own variants to the counted shared anchor, because there's nothing to value. It's also skipped if the variant it did link has no weighted average cost yet — typically a product it has never received against a costed receipt. In both cases the line simply isn't written, nothing is shown to you, and the period under-states what that count actually cost.
There's no indication anywhere in Yessort that this has happened. If a period looks lighter than you expected, check that every tenant on the counts you covered has the item linked to the anchor and has a cost against it.
For the steps, see run an operator settlement.