The Scenario
You work in accounts receivable. A customer called claiming their account balance is zero — they paid weeks ago. Your records show an outstanding balance of $4,200. Before you call them back and tell them they are wrong, you want to check whether any credit notes were issued against their account that might not have been applied. You have no clean view of credit notes by customer in your current sheet.
The bad version:
- You log into Xero, navigate to Credit Notes, and start filtering by customer — Xero shows you the credit notes one page at a time, and the filter does not remember your selection when you click into a record
- You write down three credit notes for this customer, go back to the invoice screen to check if they were applied, and find one was applied to a different invoice than the one with the outstanding balance
- You still cannot tell why the balance is what it is, and the customer is still waiting for a callback
Customer balance discrepancies always take longer to investigate than they should when the data is scattered across multiple Xero screens.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your sheet and pulls Xero credit note data directly — filtered, formatted, and grouped for investigation.
Open your AR investigation sheet 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 tab 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 tab sorted by customer
- Credit note number, contact, amount, date, and status appear in separate columns — ready to filter by customer name
- AUTHORISED and DRAFT credit notes are both included so you can see pending credits that have not yet been applied
- The sort by contact name groups all credits for the same customer together, making the balance investigation immediate
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 "Westfield Industries" and write credit note number, amount, issue date, status, and remaining credit into the Credit Notes tab — one row per credit note
You need to see which credit notes have been fully applied versus partially applied
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 tab — flag any row where remaining credit is greater than zero as "Unapplied balance"
You want a summary by customer of total credit issued versus total 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 tab with: Contact Name, Number of Credit Notes, Total Credits Issued, Total Remaining Credit
Pull all credit notes, cross-reference against outstanding invoices, and flag where a credit exists but has not been applied
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 the contact name, credit note number, remaining credit, and outstanding invoice amount into the Unapplied Credits tab — in a fifth column note whether there is a matching invoice to apply against
One prompt handles the export, the cross-reference, and the summary.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your AR investigation sheet 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.