At a glance
| Unit to report | Transactions: invoices, bills, bank transactions and journals, counted together. |
| Where the count lives | Accounting menu, then Reports, then the Account Transactions report. Select all accounts, set a custom date range from your first year to today, and read the rows. |
| Typical years retained | Xero holds the organisation's history for as long as the subscription runs. The earliest dated row in the Account Transactions report is your start year. |
| What usually makes it valuable | Invoices with outcomes: issued, paid, part paid, overdue or written off, and when. Quotes tied to the invoices that followed. The reconciliation decisions behind every bank line. |
| What stays private | Contact names, ABNs, bank account numbers, addresses, emails and phone numbers. Payroll. Any client organisation you only have adviser access to. |
Paths checked against Xero Central: Account Transactions report and About exporting data out of Xero. Menu labels move between Xero releases, so check in your version.
Where the count lives
Nothing needs exporting. The number is on screen in a few minutes.
- Sign in with a user that can see reports. The Adviser role always can; a Standard user may need report access added. Check in your version.
- Open the Accounting menu and choose Reports.
- Open the Account Transactions report. The search box at the top of the Reports page finds it quickly.
- In the Accounts selector, choose all accounts. In the date range, pick a custom range that starts in the year you joined Xero and ends today. The presets (this month, last quarter) are too narrow.
- Update the report. Each row is one transaction line. Scroll to the bottom for the row count, or export to Excel and read the row number in the spreadsheet.
- Sort by date ascending. The first row's date is the start year to enter on the intake.
A split invoice shows as more than one row, so this count runs a little high. That is fine: the intake is a screen, not an audit.
What to put in the intake
| Field | What to enter | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | The row count from Account Transactions, rounded. | About 48,000 transactions |
| Years covered | Start year to now, and whether there were gaps or a migration in. | 2017 to now, continuous, migrated from MYOB in 2017 |
| Estimate | Tick it if the number is rounded or read off a report rather than exported. | Ticked |
Estimates are fine. A number within a factor of two is enough for the screen call.
Why buyers value it
A Xero ledger is a record of money decisions with outcomes attached. Every invoice carries a due date, a paid date and a sequence of reminders, credit notes or write-offs in between, so a buyer sees how a real business chases, concedes and recovers cash. Quotes that became invoices, and the ones that did not, sit beside each other. Bank reconciliation holds thousands of small matching decisions, each one a labelled example of how an operator reads a statement line. The notes and history on every record add the reasoning in the owner's own words. Models that need to learn how a business manages cash want this sequence, not the balance at the end of it.
What stays private
- Contact names, ABNs, bank account numbers, addresses, emails and phone numbers of customers, suppliers and staff are irreversibly removed before any buyer sees anything, and every removal is written to the audit ledger.
- Payroll inside Xero (pay runs, tax file numbers, superannuation details) is excluded at extraction.
- If you are an accountant or bookkeeper, your clients' Xero organisations are their asset. Only organisations you own are in scope.
- Buyers receive a prepared, de-identified copy under licence, never a login to your Xero and never the raw extract. The Trust and Security pages cover the full process.
If you want to export the full history
Only after an offer is accepted. Until then the intake runs on the counts you type in. In most engagements you do not need to export at all: with your signature we connect read-only. This is Xero's documented route if you would rather hand over files.
- Xero recommends exporting five things for a complete record: chart of accounts, contacts, invoices, bills and the fixed asset list. Each has an Export option on its list page; contacts export as CSV.
- For the ledger itself, run the General Ledger Detail report under Accounting, then Reports, over your full date range, and export it.
- Any Xero report exports from the Export button as Excel, PDF or Google Sheets. Excel is the one to use.
- Run the same reports a financial year at a time if the full range is slow to load. Check in your version for row limits.
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