One of the most crucial steps when closing a deal with your customers is handling the proposal and exchange of invoices.
When getting into the final stages of a deal, you'll want to provide your customers with an invoice to receive payment for your goods or services.

If you use Xero for the invoice-handling aspects of your business, you're in luck: Pipedrive's integration with Xero makes it simple to generate an invoice from your information in Pipedrive, and keep all of your important data in one place.

What is Xero?

Xero is a cloud-based accounting software tool that is popular among companies that wish to streamline their Accounts Payable and Receivable tasks.

When integrating Pipedrive and Xero, you will be able to generate invoices based on the information you already have in your Pipedrive account, and have those invoices tracked within Xero's management software, allowing you to better understand the revenue you have coming into your company when closing your Pipedrive deals.

How can I enable the Xero integration?

Before you may begin to utilize the benefits of this integration, you will need to connect your Xero account to your Pipedrive company account.

To begin, go to the Detail View of any Pipedrive deal, and click the Create invoice tab. Once there, click on the View on Marketplace button, and proceed to the Pipedrive Marketplace.
Alternatively, you may go to Tools and apps > Invoicing and find the Xero integration from the list of apps there.

Once you have found the Xero integration, click Install now, and provide the login credentials to your Xero account. Uninstalling the app can be found under Tools and apps > Marketplace apps.

Once your valid Xero login credentials have been confirmed, you will be directed back to Pipedrive to program your preferences for your Xero integration.

When programming your Xero integration, you will need to choose which Pipedrive fields populate the invoice fields set by Xero, and when your invoices will be marked as due for your customers.

• To— This field is for who you want to address the invoice to. As invoices are typically paid by the Accounts Payable department of a company, we suggest using Pipedrive's Organization - Name field. You can also choose from other organization, people contact and deal fields.

• Address— This field is for the physical address of the invoice's recipient. Since invoices are typically paid by the Accounts Payable department of a company, we suggest using Pipedrive's Organization - Address field. You can also choose from other organization, people contact and deal fields.

• E-mail—This field is the email address of the recipient of the invoice. As the E-mail field in Pipedrive is a Person-type field, we suggest utilizing Pipedrive's Person - Email field. You can also choose from other organization, people contact and deal fields.
• Customer Tax ID—Not all invoices require this information, but if you have created a custom field in Pipedrive to hold your customer's tax ID information, we suggest applying that field here.
• Due date— Here you can set up the due date of the payment. For example, if the due date is set for seven days after the issue date, an invoice created on March 13th will have have a due date of March 20th.

Once you are satisfied with your choices for the Pipedrive fields to populate your Xero invoices, click the Save button to save your integration preferences for your company Pipedrive account.

How can I use the Xero integration?

Once you've provided permission for Xero and Pipedrive to interact and have programmed your integration preferences, the Create invoice button in the Detail View of any deal will give you the detailed prompt to generate a Xero invoice for your customers.

You will be prompted to fill out the details of your invoice. The information added here will be sent to your Xero account when the invoice is saved.

Under Customer details, you will need to link the invoice to an existing customer in your Xero account or create a new one.

• The Customer Details will be filled based on the fields chosen when the invoice preferences were defined when the Xero integration was initially set up.
• The Invoice Details need to be filled out based on your company's needs. For example, if you would like to adjust the tax functions of this invoice, which currency should be used in this invoice, or any Xero invoice templates you would like to use.
• The Invoice Items are the specific line items — like goods or services — that make up the charges in your invoice. These items can be chosen from the dropdown list, which is provided from the 'Products and services' area within your connected Xero account.
  

Click on the Create invoice button once you've entered all of your invoice details.

Viewing your invoices

When an invoice has been saved as a draft, you will notice the invoice status appear, alerting you that this invoice is currently in DRAFT mode.
Invoices will continue to be a draft, until it is either deleted or approved in Xero.

Depending on the permissions set in the associated Xero account, you may need to submit a drafted invoice for approval. Once submitted, that invoice can be approved from within Xero, by the appropriate users in that Xero account.

Once the invoice has been approved in Xero, the status of the invoice will change in Pipedrive based on the updates made in the associated Xero account. For reference, there are six statuses to consider when looking at a deal's invoice in Pipedrive:

• Draft
• Awaiting Approval
• Awaiting Payment
• Paid
• Voided
• Deleted

Each invoice can be shared, downloaded to a .pdf file, opened in Xero via a separate browser tab, or sent to the customer by email, all from the Detail View in Pipedrive.