Troubleshooting Invoices Not Shipping

The Invoice Shipper collects invoices from Nookal and sends the invoice to Xero. Xero has stricter rules about what an invoice can include so sometimes a "valid" Nookal Invoice won't be accepted by Xero. This page explains the most common reasons to help you understand and fix the issue. 

How to check the Invoice Shipping Log

Open the Invoice Sidebar for the invoice. You can do this a number of ways including:

• Click on the Invoice Number on the invoice shipper page
• Use the Quick Search (Press ` and type invoice number)
• Click on an invoice number in other supported screens such as Aged Debt Report or Mega Report Revenue Popup

Once in the sidebar click on SHIPPING tab, from here you can see a sub-tab for the INVOICE and a sub-tab for each payment (EG: "DVA 2024-02-07" in the screenshot below. This should explain all of the incoming (IE: from Nookal) and outgoing (attempted invoice shipping) that has occured. 

Common Invoice Shipping Issues

Payment amount exceeds the amount outstanding on this document

This is Xero saying that your payment is higher than the amount owing on the invoice. This is usually due to:

• The invoice was for a certain amount, and the only payment on the invoice in Nookal is for more than that.
  You can tell that this happened because the balance is less than $0.00 as in the screenshot above. This often happens if you do a DVA or Medicare invoice and they pay more than you charged. (EG: Bill $50 and they pay $53 on that invoice). The correct way to fix this is to increase the amount charged to match the payment. (EG: You actually got $53 paid into your account, so update invoice to match, rather than reducing the amount paid)
• A payment on this invoice was erroneously applied before the proper Nookal Payment was shipped
  For example, a client is invoiced and the invoice is shipped successfully to Nookal. The bookkeeper then accidentally reconciles it against a bank transaction which causes Xero to record a payment on the invoice. Later when the payment is really received and entered into Nookal then Invoice Shipper tries to send that payment to Xero but the invoice is already paid. 

Cannot ship due to Lock Date

Xero has a 'Lock Date' which is usually set by your accountants or bookkeepers to 'finalise' the books for that date range. This is often done at the end of the month/quarter/year. 

If you make an invoice now with a date before the lock date (IE: 3 months ago) then Xero won't accept that invoice as the finances for that time period are now 'locked'. Your two options are:

• Get the bookkeeper/accountant to open the lock date. Then the invoice will ship, you can then close the lock date. 
• Change the date of the invoice to be after the lock date (IE: make it todays date). This will move the revenue to 'now' rather than 'then' but the invoice will ship fine.