How to send a monthly management pack from Xero

Short answer: management accounts (or management reports) are the figures you prepare for the people running the business, usually every month: a Profit and Loss for the month and year to date, a Balance Sheet, cash, who owes you money and what you owe, and a few lines of commentary. In Xero you build them from the Management report under Reports, save the selection as a report pack and re-run it each month. Xero does not email it on a schedule, so the last step is exporting the pack and sending it yourself, or using a tool that does.

Management accounts, management reports and a management pack

The three names mean nearly the same thing. Management accounts is the more common term in the UK, management reports is also widely used in Australia and New Zealand, and a management pack is the bundle of them that goes out each month. Unlike the year-end (statutory) accounts, management accounts are not filed with Companies House, HMRC, the ATO or IRD, are not audited, and have no required format: they are whatever helps the owners and directors decide what to do next. That is why the same few reports in the same order every month beat a long one-off report.

	Management accounts	Year-end accounts
Who they are for	Owners, directors, the bank if it asks	Tax authority, Companies House, shareholders
How often	Monthly or quarterly	Once a year
Format	Your choice	Set by law and accounting standards
Figures	Can include estimates (an accrual, a stock count)	Final, adjusted by the accountant

A management pack is a small bundle of reports that gives the people running a business a regular, consistent view of performance and position. Done well, it is the same set of pages in the same order every month, so readers learn where to look and spot changes quickly.

Xero already has good tools for building a pack. The part that tends to take time is getting it out of Xero and in front of the right people, on time, every month.

What belongs in a management pack

There is no single correct pack. For most small and medium businesses, a sensible starting point is:

Report	What it answers
Executive Summary	Headline figures and key ratios at a glance
Profit and Loss	Did we make money this period, and how?
Balance Sheet	What do we own and owe at period end?
Budget Summary	How are we tracking against budget?
Aged Receivables summary	Who owes us money, and how overdue is it?
Aged Payables summary	What do we owe, and when is it due?
Bank Summary	How did cash move through each account?

Some packs add a Trial Balance for the finance team (how to read and check one), or a list of unpaid invoices and unpaid bills for directors who want to see the detail behind the aged summaries.

Keep the pack short. A director who receives fifteen pages every month will read the first two. It is better to send five pages that are always read than fifteen that are skimmed.

Building the pack in Xero

Xero’s reporting module includes a Management report, and at the time of writing Xero Central describes the ability to create custom report packs containing your own selection of reports. In practice this means starting from the Management report, creating a new report pack, adding the reports you want, adjusting their settings and layouts, and saving it so it can be re-run each month. Exact menu labels can change between Xero releases, so follow Xero Central’s current instructions for your edition.

A few other native features are worth using:

• Custom layouts. Tailor the Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet to the level of detail directors need, then save them so the layout stays consistent month to month. Xero custom reports walks through Edit layout, groups, formula rows and Save as, step by step (the Xero reports guide covers which reports to start from). In the newer reports a saved layout belongs to one report, so save the Profit and Loss and the Profit and Loss by month layouts separately if the pack uses both.
• Publishing. Once the month is final, publishing creates a locked, read-only version of the report. According to Xero’s user role documentation, publishing is available to users with the Adviser role. A published pack gives you a clear record of exactly what was reported for each month.
• Export. Reports can be exported to PDF, Excel or Google Sheets. Xero Central also describes choosing the style, name and watermark before exporting to PDF, which is useful for marking a pack as draft.

For practices, Xero’s practice tools (now Xero Partner Hub, which brings together Xero HQ and Xero Practice Manager) offer report templates that can be built once and used across client organisations. If you manage many clients with similar needs, it is worth looking at what your practice edition supports.

If your directors are comfortable logging in to Xero to view a published pack, the native tools may be all you need. For the front of the pack, see adding a cover page and notes to a Xero management report; for a board, the board report template for Xero shows which reports to include and in what order.

The distribution problem

Where Xero’s native tools stop is distribution. At the time of writing Xero does not email reports on a schedule. Automatic generation and emailing of reports is listed as “In discovery” on Xero’s product ideas forum, and in May 2026 Xero said its reporting team was exploring ways to email and auto-schedule reports. Until something ships, sending the pack means exporting it and emailing it yourself. See Xero report scheduling: what Xero does and doesn’t do for a fuller breakdown.

For one business this is a few minutes a month. For a bookkeeper with fifteen clients, it is an afternoon of opening organisations, running packs, exporting files and writing emails. How to send Xero reports to clients compares the ways of doing it.

A month-end checklist

Whether you send manually or automate, the quality of the pack depends on the close. A practical checklist (the Xero month end checklist has all 12 checks and a worked month):

1. Reconcile every bank account to the last day of the month, and check the bank reconciliation report shows nothing outstanding from before the previous month end.
2. Code or clear uncategorised transactions, including suspense balances.
3. Post month-end journals: accruals, prepayments, depreciation, payroll if it is not already integrated.
4. Review receivables and payables for anything obviously wrong, such as duplicate bills or invoices that were paid but not matched.
5. Check the budget is loaded if the pack includes a Budget Summary.
6. Run the pack and read it as the director would. Do the numbers tell a story that makes sense?
7. Write a short commentary. Three or four bullet points on what changed and why add more value than an extra report.
8. Send, and publish the final version in Xero for your records.

Choosing formats

Different readers want different files:

• PDF for directors and board members who read on a phone or tablet.
• Excel (XLSX) for a finance manager or investor who wants to work with the numbers.
• CSV for loading figures into a dashboard, forecasting model or another system.

Sending a single combined PDF plus the spreadsheet versions covers most audiences without having to ask each person what they prefer.

Timing and review

Agree a send date with each client and stick to it. A pack that arrives on the 10th of every month is more useful than one that arrives “sometime in the first two weeks”. Pick a date after your normal close, not before.

For clients whose books are not always final by that date, build in a review step. The pack is prepared on schedule, someone checks it, and it only goes to the client once it has been approved.

Common questions

Does a small business have to prepare management accounts? No. Unlike the year-end accounts and tax returns, nothing requires them. They are worth doing because they show a problem while there is still time to act, and a bank or lender may ask for them regularly as a condition of a loan or overdraft. If yours does, the loan agreement says which reports and how often.

How often should management accounts be done? Monthly suits most businesses that are growing, borrowing or tight on cash; quarterly can be enough for a small, steady business. What matters more than the frequency is that they arrive soon after the period ends, while the figures can still change a decision. A pack for September that lands in late November is history, not management information.

Who prepares them? Whoever keeps the books: a bookkeeper, the accountant, a finance manager, or the owner. The work is the month-end close above, then running the same reports and writing a few lines on what changed. The accountant usually prepares the year-end accounts separately.

What is the difference between the Management report and a management pack in Xero? The Management report is Xero’s starting point for a set of reports, under Reports. A management pack is what you send: the reports you chose from it, in your order, with your layouts and commentary, exported for the people who read it. Menu names change between Xero releases, so check Xero Central for your edition.

Can Xero email the management pack automatically? Not at the time of writing. Xero can build, publish and export the pack, but sending it on a schedule is still listed as an idea under discovery, so either someone exports and emails it each month or a separate tool does. Xero report scheduling sets out what Xero does and does not do.

What should the commentary say? Three or four short points: what changed against last month or the budget, why, and what happens next. For example, “Gross margin fell from 41% to 36% because two jobs ran over on labour; both are now invoiced for the extra hours.” Variance commentary examples has more wording to copy.

Automating the monthly pack

If the distribution step is what takes the time, a scheduling tool can handle it. Full reporting suites add consolidation and forecasting as well (Xero reporting tools compared sets out Fathom, Syft, Spotlight Reporting and Joiin; for a client with two or three companies, the consolidated profit and loss guide shows how to do it in a spreadsheet). ReportPilot is one option. It connects to Xero with read-only access and emails a pack built from the reports above (Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, Executive Summary, Budget Summary, aged receivables and payables summaries, Bank Summary, plus lists of unpaid invoices, invoices raised, draft invoices and unpaid bills) as a combined PDF, XLSX and CSV. Packs run weekly, monthly or quarterly, and figures are pulled fresh from Xero at send time.

Approval mode suits the review step described above: the pack goes to the bookkeeper first with an “Approve & send” link, and only reaches the client once approved. Plans are priced by the number of organisations, starting with a single organisation, and include a 14-day free trial without a card.

The pack itself still needs a good close and a sensible selection of reports. Automation removes the repetitive part, not the judgement.