Splitting Cliniko revenue by location in Xero

Cliniko pushes an invoice to Xero when it is created and a payment once it is allocated. The contact, the lines, the amounts and the tax rate all travel. What does not travel is anything saying where the session happened. The Xero setup article walks an owner through sales accounts and clearing accounts and names no tracking category at any point, and the help centre collection covers billable items, products, payment types and practitioner invoice items with no article on businesses or locations.

So the question is not how to switch site reporting on. It is which of three substitutes a practice is willing to pay for, because Xero will only show a cut of revenue that something put on the line.

This is where the Cliniko constraint pushes a multi site group first. If a group already runs a Cliniko per site, the native integration maps each of those to its own Xero organisation and the split falls out for free. The cost is a subscription per file. The Australian plans start at A$37 a month for Ignite, with Grow at A$78, Comprehensive at A$107 and Ultimate 10 at A$143, and the introductory discount is for a customer buying their first organisation on xero.com, so site two starts at full price.

The bill is the easy part. The harder cost is that every group level number becomes a consolidation job: one chart maintained twice, one contact list duplicated, and a profit and loss for the practice as a whole that lives in a spreadsheet rather than in Xero. Where the sites sit under one ABN, the activity statement has to be assembled from two ledgers rather than run off one.

The third option is the only one Cliniko can drive on its own. Because a billable item or a practitioner can carry its own Xero sales account, a practice can create a set of revenue accounts per site and point each site's items or practitioners at them. It works, and the precedence is documented: the item setting wins, the practitioner setting comes next, the default catches the rest.

What it costs is the chart. A practice that already separates Medicare, private health fund, NDIS, DVA and private fees is carrying five or more revenue accounts before the site question is asked, and a second address doubles them. Add a third site and the profit and loss gets hard to read. The practitioner route has a second catch: it holds only while a practitioner works at one address, and it breaks the day someone covers a shift at the other rooms.

Xero gives a line item two tracking slots and no more, and the profit and loss report endpoint takes two tracking categories and no third. The allied health canonical template spends both: slot one on Practitioner and slot two on Location, each created only with the practice's consent and matched by name.

Which is the argument against the third option stated properly. It is not that a sales account per site fails. It is that the account code is already carrying the funder, and asking it to carry the address too is what turns a chart of accounts into a matrix nobody wants to maintain. The chart of accounts for a multi site clinic works the same trade in the other direction, and Xero tracking categories for a clinic covers the setup itself.

This is a Cliniko problem rather than an allied health problem, which is worth knowing before a group decides to change files rather than change systems. Zanda documents two tracking categories with multiple options and uses Location as its own worked example. Splose sets up tracking categories for locations and practitioners in Xero and then assigns them in the workspace. Both push what Cliniko does not.

That does not make either a reason to move. A practice system is chosen on clinical workflow, and the ledger follows. But it does change the shape of the decision: for a Cliniko practice the site split is bought, and for a Zanda or Splose practice it is configured. The Cliniko integration page sets out the rest of what the sync carries and what it leaves behind.