QuickBooks Time and Xero: the invoice flow from draft to paid
Administrators connecting QuickBooks Time to Xero can run invoices end to end; here is how drafts, sends, and payment statuses move between the two apps.
Linking QuickBooks Time to Xero splits invoicing across two apps, and that split drives most of the questions we see from users of this pairing. The symptoms repeat: billing controls that never appear for some users, invoices that generate with no line items, and statuses that change without anyone touching them. The accepted guidance for this integration resolves all three once you understand which app owns which step.
Who can manage invoices here?
Only administrators can manage invoices for the Xero and QuickBooks Time integration. The restriction comes from the vendor, not from a setting you can flip. If you sign in as a manager or a standard user, the billing tools stay out of reach, which is why the controls seem to vanish for part of the team.
Creation also involves the payroll manager in the documented flow. In practice, those two roles build the invoices; everyone else tracks time and leaves billing alone. The fix for missing controls is therefore a role question. Get the administrator role, or have an administrator handle the invoice.
The invoice flow from draft to paid
The integration has a fixed direction of travel. Xero holds the master records: contacts, customers, inventory items with their billing rates, and employees. Those records import into QuickBooks Time; they are not created on the time side. Employees then track their hours, tag the customer they worked for, and name the service performed.
Invoicing runs the opposite way. An administrator or payroll manager builds the invoice in QuickBooks Time, and it starts out marked Draft. The draft syncs to Xero, where someone reviews it and sends it to the client; the status then reads Sent. Once payment arrives, the invoice is marked Paid in QuickBooks Time automatically. No one updates that label by hand, which explains why statuses seem to move on their own.
Creating an invoice in QuickBooks Time
Open the Xero area in QuickBooks Time and go to Billing, then choose the new invoice option in the invoices window. The first question on screen is who to bill. Every Xero contact appears as a choice, and contacts with tracked hours show an unbilled hour count beside the name.
One catch deserves attention. Pick a contact who was never added as a customer in QuickBooks Time, or who has no tracked hours, and the screen offers to choose the job to bill instead. That option attaches another customer’s hours to this Xero contact, which helps when the paying entity differs from the record the hours were tracked under.
Filters narrow the bill further. The selected mode exposes employees and inventory items imported from Xero, along with any custom fields you added in QuickBooks Time. The hours filter defaults to every unbilled hour on file. Narrow it to a week, a month, or a set period unless you want older time swept into the invoice.
A summarize setting controls how the bill reads, and five layouts exist. The single line option merges all of that customer’s hours into one total and lists the tracked inventory items in the description. The other four present the hours with more granularity, so pick the one your client can read most easily.
Empty invoices are not always an error
Filtering has a side effect that catches teams out. If the employees you selected logged no hours, or no hours were entered for the chosen customer or inventory item, the invoice still generates, but with no lines on it. You then add items by hand.
An empty invoice after filtering is expected behavior, not a broken connection. Loosen the filters, or enter the missing time, and the lines return. Reaching for a reinstall or an app reset here simply wastes an afternoon.
Where do edits and deletions belong?
Editing and deleting sit with administrators in the same billing window, and status governs both. While an invoice is still a Draft, it remains a working document inside QuickBooks Time. Change the filters, adjust the hours, pick a different layout, or delete the draft and start over; nothing has reached the client yet.
The picture changes once the invoice syncs and goes out from Xero. The client-facing document lives on the accounting side from that point, so corrections belong in Xero, where the bill was sent. QuickBooks Time then mirrors the outcome: Sent now, Paid once the money clears. Deleting after a send is the riskiest move, because the two apps can end up disagreeing about whether the invoice ever existed. Confirm the status before removing anything that has already synced.
The pattern to keep in mind
The whole integration follows one shape. Records flow out of Xero into QuickBooks Time, invoices flow back, and payment status returns on its own. Administrators manage the billing, employees track the hours, Xero sends the bill. Once that order clicks, the quirks stop looking like faults and start reading as design.