Automatic Xero Backups: How Scheduled Exports Work
How automatic Xero backups work in Numerint: pick a day of the month, and each run exports a complete, up-to-date archive of your data and attachments.
Most people who back up Xero intend to do it regularly, but it can be forgotten, especially if left to an individual who might be away from the office, on holiday or has left the organisation.
What a scheduled backup does
Numerint can run your backup every month on a day you choose. The day is the only thing you set, and nobody has to log in and start it.
The picker offers any day from the 1st to the 28th, plus the last day of the month. Days 29, 30 and 31 are not offered, because they do not exist in every month; if you want the end of every month regardless of length, the last-day option works that out for you each time.
When a scheduled run finishes you get the same email and download the same ZIP from the Status page as you would from a backup you started yourself.
Every run is a complete archive
A scheduled run is not a delta. Each export starts from the beginning of your original purchase and runs up to the current month, so every ZIP is one complete, current archive of your Xero data and attachments rather than a fragment to reassemble.
Underneath, only new and changed attachments are fetched from Xero, which is what keeps a monthly run cheap, but the output is always the whole thing. If a run is ever missed, the next one still covers the gap, because its range still spans the missing month.
Each run also brings the data up to the current position and adds whatever attachments are new, so each download is a picture of your books as they stood on the day it ran. Keep those ZIPs rather than overwriting them and you build a series of snapshots. Comparing one month against another shows what changed in between, which the live Xero organisation cannot show you.
The scope comes from what you have already paid for. The Xero types, the date range and the Generate PDF options are all inherited, so a scheduled run cannot widen and cost you more than you agreed.
If you look after a lot of Xero organisations
Each organisation has its own schedule and its own day, so a hundred of them back up without anyone starting a hundred jobs, and they keep doing so each month. Days can be spread across the month or aligned with each client's close. Prepaid cover for several organisations goes on a single invoice.
What it costs
Scheduled backups run on prepaid cover: you buy a period of backups up front, on a single invoice, rather than going through checkout every time.
This is not a subscription. There is no recurring charge and nothing to cancel. It is one forecast charge for the period you want covered, and because each run only picks up what is new or changed, a year of monthly backups costs a fraction of twelve separate first-time exports.
Prepaying does not oblige you to schedule anything. Some customers buy cover purely so they can run a backup whenever they like without paying each time. Scheduling is an option on top.
If your cover lapses, the schedule stays exactly as you left it and simply stops running. Each due date is skipped, so you are never billed for a backup you have not paid for, and it resumes by itself when you prepay again. We email you before your cover runs out, so it should not come as a surprise.
Setting it up
Email info@numerint.com with the Xero organisations you want covered and for how long. We forecast the volumes, send one invoice, and switch scheduling on once it is paid. After that, the only thing left to decide is which day of the month suits you.