Bulk convert bank statements to Xero

Xero's bank feeds are built primarily for keeping up, not reconstructing a complete history. A newly connected feed may provide some earlier transactions, but the available start date depends on the bank and feed. First find the earliest complete period in Xero. Anything missing before that boundary, whether it's a prior financial year, a newly added account or a client who's just arrived with a shoebox, has to be imported from statements.

Xero accepts a CSV import per bank account, which is where bulk conversion fits. Convert the statements in batches of up to ten, download the merged CSV, and you've got every transaction for the period in one chronological file ready to import. One import step instead of twelve.

Batch per bank account rather than per client. Xero imports into a specific account, so a merged file mixing two accounts has to be split before it's usable. Keeping each account's statements in their own batch avoids that entirely.

The CSV arrives with date, description, debit, credit and category columns. Xero's import wizard maps columns as you go, so there's no reformatting to do first and the file works as downloaded. The category column gives you a head start on coding, though Xero's own account codes and bank rules still decide how everything reconciles.

If you're doing this regularly, saved category rules on the Professional and Business plans mean recurring merchants come through consistently categorised, so each import needs less attention than the one before it.