When you create a group, Recharger creates two "don't recharge" rules by default for each entity in the recharge group. One rule for revenue account code transactions and one for expense account code transactions. As every transaction from the P&L feeds into Mayday, and every transaction needs to be matched by a rule, by default we're saying don't recharge. You then create rules for your recharge situations which supersede the default.

You will likely want the default rule to be what happens to the majority of your expense or revenue transactions. In most businesses, this will be “don't recharge” but there are certain situations where you might want a rule that does recharge those costs or revenues to be the default. For example, if you have a transfer pricing policy where the cost centre entity cost plus recharges all or close to all of its costs, you can set this to be the default.

These dictate how expenses incurred by an entity are recharged to other entities in the recharge group. There are three types of expense rule:

3. Don’t recharge: This will be relevant if you have set a rule other than the “don't recharge” default to be your default rule.

These dictate how income generated by one entity flows through to other entities in the recharge group. There are two types of revenue rule:

2. Don't recharge (revenue): Other entities won't be able to receive any income from matching transactions

Balance sheet rules are used by finance teams that post costs that they want recharged in balance sheet codes (most likely asset codes) rather than P&L codes. This would mean that these costs wouldn't hit the P&L of that entity when they were wholly for the benefit of another. Balance sheet rules can only be posted to expense codes in the entity on the receiving end of them.

Mayday Rules don't look up from source transactions in Xero in the same way as Expense, Revenue and Balance Sheet Rules. These are for regular, fixed-amount recharges, for example, a management charge. Mayday Rules can only be posted to expense codes in the entity on the receiving end of them.

Yes, you can within each entity. You'll see a small plus button on the right-hand side of the rule - click here to create a duplicate rule.

Yes, rules are indifferent to debits and credits. If it hits that account code then it will be picked up by the rule. For example, a refund to an expense code.

Once you’ve selected which transactions you’d like to recharge, you’ll set up apportionments define how those transactions should be recharged. There are two ways you can do this:

In-rule apportionments:

On a case-by-case basis, you can specify within the recharge rule itself what the percentage apportionment should be for those recharges.

Preset apportionments:

Setting up preset apportionments is a real time saver for those situations where you’d want to set up several rules using the same methodology to distribute. This way, it only takes a couple of minutes to update from this page each month rather than editing each individual rule.

Head to the blue navigation bar and select apportionments. Here you can easily update things like headcount as and when the numbers change, and the rules will automatically use the most up-to-date information when calculating your recharges.

You can use either percentages or units to create your apportionment numbers.

Remember to check that they are up to date before running your calculations each month.

Make sure to specify apportionments and total apportionment units. For example, Mayday HQ incurs a cost and needs to recharge 25% to Mayday Inc and 25% to Mayday Australasia. You’d make sure the total apportionment units say 100, specify that each of those entities will be recharged 25. This means that the other 50% will remain in Mayday HQ.

In the event that a transaction matches more than one rule, Recharger will pick one of the rules based on the following precedence order:

This ensures the right transactions are caught by the rule.

You can look up from multiple account codes but can only send to one. If you would like account code symmetry, you will need to create individual rules per account code.

The system will look up the source’s base currency. For example, Mayday HQ’s base currency is £, therefore a bill posted to Mayday HQ in $ will come through converted into £. The foreign exchange rates will be configured as of the date on the bill. We pick up what is posted to the general ledger of that entity and general ledger in that entity's base currency.

If a new entity is added, you’ll create and edit recharge rules to accommodate the new entity.

If an entity is deleted, some of your recharge rules may be broken because there may be empty fields. We'll flag this to you so that you can edit your rules.

Any changes to the name/number of nominal codes or deleted codes will break the rules that involve those codes. If you need to change any of your rules to send costs or revenues to a newly added code, you'll do that manually.

Yes, Mayday recognises when an account type is changed in Xero’s chart of accounts.

We currently only offer entity-to-entity recharges, interdepartmental recharges are on our public product roadmap.

We’ll be monitoring and notify you if any late transactions come through:

Yes, every transaction comes through Mayday and then the ones to be recharged are picked up by the rules you set. If the transaction doesn't match a rule it will filter under "Don't recharge" and it will not be recharged to another entity in the group.

Yes – once all the bookkeeping is up to date in Xero and you’re happy with your rules and apportionments you can then run calculations. You have the ability to re-open and recalculate the postings.

You can run calculations (and post the recharges) at any point during the month and then update them for additional transactions as many times as you want.

By default, we use the exchange rate provided by Fixer (a code for foreign exchange

rates and currency conversion software), but you can override this.

If your Xero organisations do not support multi-currency, and the two entities are not of the same base currency, then the Postings page will force you to post journals in each entity's home currency. If a currency conversion is taking place, you can override the exchange rate being used here too.

In the postings page (the last step of calculations), you set VAT at the line item level for that recharge. There is an option within that to apply the VAT treatment to all line items. We will then remember that VAT treatment for future months.

Marking a calculation as final will do the following:

The process here is to delete those calculations, and also to delete any postings in Xero from those calculations, and then to create new ones.

When a calculation is marked as final, it will only ever use the rules as they were defined at that time, which means there's an audit trail and late transactions can be added in even after any rule edits are made. It does mean that if you want to change the rules, it's not the simplest process, so we recommend you’re sure before you click mark as final.

After you run the recalculation, you'll be able to see the revised postings before you then choose to edit and update the posting in Xero.

The adjustments are posted by updating the original invoice and bill. Xero doesn't allow you to edit invoices and bills that have payments assigned to them. So in this case you will need to unreconcile the original payments in Xero, update the postings in Mayday, and then re-reconcile the original payments with a part or overpayment as relevant.

Calculations are based on the date that it hits the ledger (i.e. invoice or bill date), not the date it is paid (if that is different).

The recharges arising from the transactions in calculations step one may result in subsequent recharges if posted within the same month. For example, if a transaction hits the P&L where the expense is on behalf of one entity and it’s recharged at cost (no value add), however, there’s another agreement where all expenses come back to the original entity with a markup. This situation would produce recharge transactions.

In the recharge transactions step, you’ll tell us when your recharges will be posted and review how the recharge transactions are treated. This is essentially recharges of recharges, where recharges are posted into one entity and then recharged on; this tells you what's going to happen as a result of your recharge rules.

We can't access a locked period in Xero. You'd need to create a credit note in Xero to reverse the transaction and change the issue date in Mayday.