Grouping and hiding line items isn't the only way to simplify what a client sees on a Xero invoice — it's just the one that doesn't create a new problem to replace the old one. Here's what businesses do instead, and why each approach tends to cause more trouble than the detailed invoice it was meant to fix.
The simplest option is also the most common: send the Xero invoice exactly as it comes out, every line item included. It's zero extra work, and it's honest — but a client reading a dozen individually priced entries for materials, call-outs and adjustments doesn't see thoroughness, they see clutter. It's the invoice equivalent of showing your working when nobody asked to see it.
It also invites a conversation you didn't sign up for. A client who can see an "administration fee" or a margin built into a material cost, itemised in black and white, tends to ask about it — and explaining a markup line item to a client is an awkward conversation that has nothing to do with the quality of the work.
A more involved workaround is to invoice the client a single consolidated line item, then use manual journal entries in Xero to redistribute that amount across the correct income accounts for your own reporting. It keeps the client-facing invoice simple, but it moves the complexity into your books instead of removing it.
Manual journals built to bridge a client-facing total back to the real account breakdown are a well-known source of reconciliation errors, particularly around a Sales Clearing Account that's supposed to net to zero and often doesn't once a few of these adjustments have built up. It's a bookkeeping workaround for a presentation problem, and it puts the accuracy of your actual financial reporting at risk to solve it.
The other common workaround is recreating the invoice outside Xero entirely — grouping line items by hand in a Word or Excel template. It solves the presentation problem, but creates a second, disconnected record: customer details, amounts and line items all get re-entered by hand, and a change made in Xero afterwards doesn't ripple down to the Word or Excel copy at all — the two documents just quietly drift apart. See why Word and Excel invoice templates become a nightmare for the full breakdown of what that actually costs.
InvoicePolish's grouping and hiding of line items doesn't ask you to trade one problem for another. The detailed breakdown stays exactly where it belongs, in Xero, for your own bookkeeping and reporting — nothing gets moved into a manual journal, and nothing gets rebuilt in a second document. Why your accounting records shouldn't be your client invoice explains the reasoning; how to simplify complex Xero invoices walks through doing it.
The result is a client-facing invoice that reads as clean and considered, generated directly from the same Xero data your accountant already relies on — no clutter, no clearing-account risk, and no second file to keep in sync.
It's not that it can't be done — it's that it moves a presentation problem into your actual accounting, where a mismatched Sales Clearing Account or a miskeyed journal entry can cause real reconciliation errors. Grouping the client-facing invoice in InvoicePolish keeps the same detailed records in Xero without needing a workaround at the ledger level at all.
Detail and transparency aren't quite the same thing. A client can trust an invoice without needing to see every internal line that produced the total — clarity usually reads as more professional than an exhaustive breakdown, not less.
No — there's nothing to migrate. You keep creating the real invoice in Xero as normal, and InvoicePolish generates the polished version directly from that data. See [why Word and Excel invoice templates become a nightmare](why-word-excel-invoice-templates-become-a-nightmare) for the full comparison.
No. Every original line item, account code and tax treatment stays untouched in Xero — grouping and hiding only change what's shown on the client-facing PDF.
Keep your books exactly as they are in Xero, and give clients a clean invoice.
No disruption to your Xero account. Cancel anytime.