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Posting, rolling back & reposting

TrueBooks turns each settlement into a single AUTHORISED invoice in Xero. Here's the full lifecycle — preview, post, void, repost — and the guard-rails that prevent duplicates from creeping in.

The post-to-Xero flow

From the Settlements list, opening a settlement reveals three actions: Preview, Post and (after posting) Rollback / Repost. The standard happy path is preview → post:

1. Preview aggregates every settlement line through the classifier and groups them by (description, account, tax type). The result is a fully-priced summary you can eyeball before anything touches Xero — sales, refunds, FBA fees, marketplace VAT, and so on, each as one invoice line at the right rate.
2. Post creates an AUTHORISED ACCREC invoice in Xero with those lines, dated to the settlement's deposit date (or end date if the deposit hasn't landed yet) and due immediately.

Tax amounts are back-calculated from gross-inclusive totals using tax = gross × rate / (100 + rate) — that's the correct calculation for invoices where Xero needs the line in tax-inclusive terms. The total of all lines reconciles to the settlement's net deposit to the penny.

Invoice numbers and references

Two identifiers attach to every TrueBooks-posted Xero invoice:

• The invoice number — a sequential ID like AMZ-TB-10001, AMZ-TB-10002, … TrueBooks issues these from a per-workspace counter that ticks up by one for each new settlement.
• The reference — a stable string like (£1,275.20) TBUK-26881161592. The amount is the settlement total; the suffix is the Amazon settlement ID.

The reference is the primary key from TrueBooks's perspective. It never changes for a given settlement, even across reposts — so it's the safest identifier to search on in Xero if you're cross-referencing.

The invoice number is reused on a repost rather than incrementing — which is unusual but deliberate. Without that, every repost would burn a fresh sequence number and produce a confusing audit trail. By reusing the same number, an old voided invoice and a fresh re-posted one share an invoice number, separated by their statuses (VOIDED vs AUTHORISED).

Rolling back a posting

If you need to undo a settlement post — wrong mapping, mid-period mistake, accountant requested a change — open the settlement and click Rollback. TrueBooks does two things atomically:

1. Voids the Xero invoice. (Voided, not deleted — Xero keeps the audit trail.)
2. Resets the settlement back to "Draft" status in TrueBooks, clearing the posted-invoice link.

From there you can fix whatever needed fixing and post again. If you change account or tax mappings between rollback and post, the new invoice will reflect the new mappings.

Reposting

Repost is a one-click rollback-then-post. If the settlement is currently AUTHORISED and you click Repost, TrueBooks voids the existing invoice, then creates a fresh one with the same reference and (per above) the same invoice number. The classifier and mappings are re-evaluated on the way through, so this is the right action when you want updated mappings to take effect.

How TrueBooks prevents duplicates

Two real-world scenarios used to risk producing duplicate invoices for the same settlement:

• A repost where the void of the original silently failed (network blip, Xero rate-limit) but the post step still ran.
• Manual Xero edits that left an orphaned AUTHORISED invoice we didn't know about.

TrueBooks now defends against both:

1. Before posting, we look up every invoice in your Xero org whose reference matches the settlement's reference. Any active matches are voided first, and the lowest existing invoice number is reused — so we never create a second AUTHORISED invoice for the same settlement.
2. Repost throws hard on void errors instead of warning and continuing — if Xero refuses to void the previous invoice, we abort the repost rather than create a duplicate.

The Xero integrity tools

For workspaces that have been in use for a while — especially ones where invoices have been edited manually in Xero — there's a one-shot cleanup tool at Settings → Account → Xero Integrity Tools. It scans every TrueBooks-tagged invoice in your Xero org, groups them by reference, and flags any reference that has more than one active invoice attached. You can run it in dry-run first to see what it would do; once you're happy, run it for real and it voids the duplicates per group, keeps the lowest-numbered one, and reconciles your TrueBooks records to match. Safe to leave alone if you've never had duplicates — the scan is read-only by default.

Bulk operations

From the Settlements list you can multi-select rows and post them as a batch. Each settlement still becomes its own Xero invoice — the batch UI is just a way to avoid clicking Post on twenty rows individually. Failed postings (bad mapping, Xero validation error, etc.) are reported per-row so you can fix and retry without losing the rest of the batch.

What about manual journals?

Some sellers prefer manual journals over invoices — the data model supports it, and TrueBooks's posting service can write either. Today the UI defaults to invoices because that's what most UK accountants prefer for marketplace settlements. If you need manual-journal output instead, get in touch and we'll switch your workspace over.