I'm trying to work around the Xero API's lack of support for payment via checks.
If I use the payments endpoint to create and apply new payments to existing invoices, and as part of the PUT add the check number to the reference field, does anyone know if that will be automatically matched when the check is cashed and shows up in our bank statement feed? I can't find Xero's internal reconciliation rules detailed anywhere.
Our issue is that we write about 2k checks per month and many have the same amounts, so we rely on the check number to match and reconcile. Currently Xero automatically matches 95%+ of our checks to bank statement lines we get via our bank feed. My concern is that without a check number linked to the API-created payment, Xero won't match checks to the correct bank statement items, and then we've got 2,000 payments that have to each be reconciled by manual searches for the reference number.
I've imported a test CSV bank rec file and that matched 3 of 3 test payments, but need to explore this more using identical amounts. In the demo company I could create 1,000 bill payments, apply 1,000 payments to them, and import 1,000 statement lines and see how the reconciliation screen looks, but wanted to see if someone already knew the answer!
(I believe we'll also lose the ability to quickly search payments via the check register but we may have to accept that. We send our check list to an outside printing/mailing firm so don't actually need to print the checks in Xero.)
