For the two systems to balance, all LEAP journals would need to be sent from LEAP to Xero.

Click the LEAP Menu > Accounting > General Ledger Link – and check the following with dates set to All:

• Status – Error/Not exported
• Status – On Hold
• Status – Warning (warning ones may have exported – but it’s good to double-check)

Any errors should be resolved first.

There may be useful and valid reasons why journals have been put On-Hold. The user should try to establish why the entries were marked as On Hold before making any changes. 

If there have been journals done in Xero on the ledgers used by LEAP, then the two systems won’t match (as LEAP would not know of those journals).

In Xero, go to Reports > All Reports and select the Account Transactions report from the Accounting section. Select the nominal that is being examined and a date range that will include all dates (e.g. 01/01/2000 to present).  In the bottom right of the screen, there will be an Export button. Click Export. Open the spreadsheet and Enable Editing (if needed). Highlight a cell in the Date, Type, Transaction, etc. row and turn on Filtering (either Home > Sort & Filter  > Filter on the ribbon or Ctrl+Shift+L on the keyboard).

For both the Transaction and Reference columns separately, go to the drop-down arrow and select Text Filters > Custom Filter and set it to only show rows that Do Not Begin With LJ (i.e. hide the LEAP Journals)  Do this for both Transaction and Reference. Any journals that remain after this were not posted through LEAP.

If the journals should exist on both systems – you could Reverse or Void (Delete) the one entered solely on Xero by opening up that journal, going to the ‘Journal Options’ menu, and choosing either option. If the journal is then entered in LEAP and the resulting journal is exported – this will resolve the discrepancy.

It is possible to delete transactions in Xero. If journals exported from LEAP have been removed, then you would not expect the two systems to match.

To investigate this, you would need Adviser access in Xero. You can tell if this is present by whether or not Adviser is an option on the Xero toolbar.  If this is not present, it is possible to be an Admin Xero user but not to have access to the Adviser tab. If so, you can enable your Adviser privileges. To do this, you would go to Settings > General Settings and select Users. Click on the three dots to the right of your current user and select Change Permissions. You can enable the Adviser option from this screen. If you don’t have the permission to make this change, you would need the credentials of a user who does.

Once you have this tab available, you can go to Adviser > History & Notes Activity. There is a search field on the right-hand side – type in the word - Deleted. You can then check through various date ranges over the time that the system was being used. The date range would relate to the date of the Deletion, rather than the original journal date.

If there are deleted journals, you need to click on the journal to view the details of the journal (if there are several, right-clicking & using the ‘open in new tab’ option would be advisable). If the journal relates to a LEAP nominal, then this will have caused a discrepancy between the two systems. This process would need to be repeated for all deleted items to be sure whether or not a deleted item is the entire cause of a difference.

Any journals that have been deleted from Xero should be re-entered directly in Xero. The details of the journal will be visible on the account history entry.

If you had a transition from a previous system, you would likely have opening balances for some ledgers (e.g. LEAP Debtors, LEAP Client Fees). You can see the opening balances added to Xero by going to Settings > General Settings > Conversion Balances.

For the opening LEAP balances, the best place to look is the Transitions Approval Report that you would have received following your data transition. If you don’t have sight of this report, you can run off the relevant report (if there is one) for the information as at the date your information was brought into LEAP (e.g. if you were checking the opening balance for the LEAP Debtors nominal, you’d run the Aged Debtors report for that date).

If the opening balances in Xero are incorrect (or absent entirely) they can be added from the same screen – Settings > General Settings > Conversion Balances.

If you suspect that the opening balances in LEAP are incorrect, if you can provide the details of one or more cases where your LEAP balances aren’t matching your previous system, the LEAP Helpdesk can investigate alongside the Transitions team that converted the data in the first place. 

Not all ledgers in Xero have a corresponding LEAP report. Many will also behave differently depending on the type of Accounting Basis being used (Cash, Accrual, or Hybrid).

The other thing to double-check is that the LEAP report is configured correctly. A common mistake in reports involving invoices is to include Draft invoices – all invoice reports should be set to show only Printed (Sent/Final) invoices as those are the only ones that affect the accounts.

One other thing to be mindful of is whether or not the report in question is including GST. The Xero ledgers will be for the net value, as the GST element will be assigned to the GST nominal (or in the case of Hybrid accounting, potentially the LEAP GST Collected nominal).