Shipping costs that post themselves to Xero.
Every booking creates the right entry — the courier cost as a bill, the customer's shipping charge on the invoice, VAT treated correctly. Month-end stops being a spreadsheet of courier PDFs.
Connect XeroExactly what lands in your ledger.
No summary journals at month-end. Each entry is created when the event happens, referenced to the waybill that caused it.
Courier invoice versus the rate you booked.
Couriers over-bill. Not maliciously, usually — a re-weigh here, a surcharge there, a fuel levy applied to the wrong band. Across a few hundred parcels a month it adds up to real money, and nobody has time to check every line by hand.
- Every courier statement line is matched to the booking it belongs to using the waybill number.
- Rate variances are flagged with the booked price, the billed price and the difference, so you can query with evidence.
- Re-weighs and dimension corrections show the original and revised measurements side by side.
- Unmatched lines — parcels billed that Motho never booked — are surfaced rather than buried in the total.
- Approved lines post straight through to Xero as bills; disputed ones stay out of your books until they're resolved.
Connecting Xero
You cannot break your chart of accounts: Motho writes only to the accounts you nominate, and never creates or edits one.
- Step 01
Connect with OAuth
Authorise Motho against your Xero organisation. No API keys to manage and no credentials stored on our side beyond the token.
scopes: accounting.transactions, accounting.contacts, accounting.settings
- Step 02
Map your accounts
Pick the expense account for courier costs, the income account for shipping charged to customers, and the tax rates for each. Motho reads your existing chart of accounts — it never creates accounts and never edits ones you already use.
e.g. 429 Freight & Courier · 200 Sales — Shipping
- Step 03
That's it
Bills post as drafts by default, so nothing reaches your ledger without approval until you decide to trust it. Switch to auto-approve whenever you're ready.
Xero and shipping, answered
How is VAT on shipping handled?
Local courier services are posted at the 15% standard rate against the tax rate you nominate during setup. Where a courier isn't a VAT vendor, the line posts as no-VAT. Zero-rated export consignments are coded separately so your VAT201 doesn't need manual adjustment.
Does it support multi-currency?
Motho ships domestically within South Africa, so everything posts in ZAR. Cross-border consignments are on the roadmap and multi-currency posting will land with them — we'd rather say that than imply support we haven't built.
Which Xero plans work?
Any Xero plan that includes bills and invoices — Growing and Established in the South African line-up. The Starter plan's monthly transaction limits will bite quickly at real shipping volume.
What happens on refunds and returns?
A cancelled collection reverses the draft bill before it's approved. A return leg posts as its own cost line, and a successful courier claim posts a credit note against the original bill so the net cost of the failed delivery is visible on one order.
Can it break my chart of accounts?
No. Motho only writes transactions to accounts you explicitly nominate. It has no permission to create, rename or archive accounts, and it never touches historical entries.
Can I post to a tracking category?
Yes. Bills and invoice lines can carry a Xero tracking category — most merchants use it to split shipping cost by sales channel or warehouse.
Get shipping costs into Xero automatically.
Connect in a couple of minutes and post your first bill today.
Start shipping with Motho