The Scenario
You are the accounts receivable manager at a distribution company. A customer called on Monday disputing their balance — they claim they paid invoice 2847 six weeks ago. Your records show $6,800 outstanding. Before you go back to them with a definitive answer, you want to check whether any credit notes were issued against their account that might explain the discrepancy. You need the credit note data in your Excel workbook to cross-reference.
The bad version:
- You log into Xero, navigate to Credit Notes, filter by customer, and find three credit notes for this contact spread across two pages
- You click into each one to check whether it was applied against invoice 2847 or a different invoice — Xero takes you to a detail page each time and you have to navigate back to the list
- You still cannot determine from memory whether the credit notes account for the full disputed amount, and you have to call the customer back and say you are still looking into it
Balance disputes that should take five minutes turn into a half-day investigation because the credit note data is not in your reconciliation workbook.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook and pulls Xero credit note data directly — filtered, formatted, and ready for cross-referencing against your invoice records.
Open your AR investigation workbook and try this prompt:
List all Xero credit notes from the last 6 months and write credit note number, contact name, amount, issue date, and status into the Credit Notes worksheet starting at row 2 — one row per credit note, sorted by contact name then issue date
What You Get
- Every credit note from the last six months lands in the Credit Notes worksheet sorted by customer
- Credit note number, contact, amount, date, and status are in separate columns — filter by customer name and the investigation is immediate
- AUTHORISED and DRAFT credit notes are both included so you can see pending credits not yet applied
- Grouping by contact name puts all credits for the same customer together
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You only need credit notes for one specific customer
List all Xero credit notes from the last 6 months where contact name is "Meridian Supplies" and write credit note number, amount, issue date, status, and remaining credit into the Credit Notes worksheet — one row per credit note
You need to see fully applied versus partially applied credits
Export all Xero credit notes with status AUTHORISED from the last 6 months and write credit note number, contact, total amount, remaining credit, and applied amount (total minus remaining) into the Credit Notes worksheet — flag any row where remaining credit is greater than zero as "Unapplied balance"
You want a summary by customer of total credits issued and remaining
Get all Xero credit notes from the last 6 months, group by contact name, and write one row per contact into the Credit Summary worksheet: Contact Name, Number of Credit Notes, Total Credits Issued, Total Remaining Credit
Pull all unapplied credits and cross-reference against outstanding invoices
Export all Xero credit notes with status AUTHORISED and remaining credit greater than zero — for each one check whether the contact has any outstanding AUTHORISED invoices — write contact name, credit note number, remaining credit, and outstanding invoice total into the Unapplied Credits worksheet — in column E note whether there is a matching invoice to apply against
One prompt handles the export, the cross-reference, and the unapplied credit summary.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your AR investigation workbook with Xero connected, then ask it to pull credit notes for the customer you are researching. You might also want to read about exporting outstanding Xero invoices for AR aging or exporting Xero payments for reconciliation.