How to give each site manager their own P&L in Xero

A manager running one site needs a Profit & Loss for that site: their sales, the costs they control, and the profit left over. Xero can report by tracking category, but it cannot give that manager a login limited to their own one — every Xero user role covers the whole organisation. So this is usually a spreadsheet, rebuilt by hand every month.

What you need in Xero first

1. A tracking category per site. Call it Site, Location, Branch — whatever you already use. One option per site.
2. Transactions tagged with it. Bills, invoices and bank transactions coded to the site they belong to.
3. Payroll tagged too. Most multi-site operators post payroll as a manual journal; tag those journal lines with the site or the wage cost lands nowhere.

If tagging is patchy, fix that before anything else. A report can only be as good as the coding underneath it.

Decide what a manager should be accountable for

This is the part worth doing carefully, and it is a management decision rather than an accounting one.

• Include the lines they influence: sales, cost of sales, wages, consumables, utilities, repairs, local marketing.
• Leave out the costs they cannot change: rent, royalties, head-office recharges, interest, depreciation, the owner's drawings.

A manager judged on costs they cannot affect stops trusting the report. Leave those lines out and the conversation stays on what they can actually do something about.

How to set it up with Vizii

1. Connect Xero and sync. Your tracking categories come through with the data.
2. Open Profit & Loss and build the layout once. Sections in order — Sales, Cost of Sales, Gross Profit, your operating cost sections, then the bottom-line profit — with the account codes in each. Start from the hospitality preset if "Controllables" and "Profit after Controllables" is your wording, or from an empty layout. Every label can be renamed.
3. Check it against Xero. Run it for last month with no filter and reconcile the totals before anyone else sees it.
4. Preview as a manager. Pick one and look at exactly what they will get: their site, their lines, their totals.
5. Invite them. Scope them to their own tracking category option, and give them the Profit & Loss permission. That is its own permission, so you can give them the report without bills, invoices or anything else.
6. Copy the layout to your other companies. Then adjust per client or per brand — the chart of accounts is rarely identical.

They verify their email through a link, open their own report, and see the month and the year to date with % of sales on every line. Year to date follows the financial year end set in Xero, so a March year end is treated as one.

What each manager sees

• Their own site only. Another site's figures are never sent to their browser.
• Only the accounts in the layout. One you left out does not appear in their rows, their subtotals or their exports — including an account added in Xero later.
• PDF and Excel exports of their own report, titled with their site.

Finance keeps the whole P&L, plus a row for anything tagged to no site at all.

Good practice

• Start with one site. Reconcile it, then roll out.
• Agree the tagging rules with whoever does the bookkeeping, and make payroll journals part of that agreement.
• Review the layout when the chart of accounts changes. A new account stays out of the report until you add it, which is the safe default but does mean it waits for you.
• Review access when people move roles.

FAQ

Does this work with QuickBooks? Not yet. The report is built from Xero tracking categories; QuickBooks support is planned.

Which periods can a manager see? The selected month and the year to date, each with % of sales.

Can a manager see two sites? Yes — scope them to both options.

Is anything missing from the figures? Entries Xero posts automatically are not included yet: tracked-inventory cost of sales, foreign-currency revaluation and fixed-asset depreciation. Everything coded to an invoice, bank transaction or journal is there, and admins see a note on the report saying so.

Can I change the wording? Yes. Every section and subtotal title is renamable.

Full detail is on the Profit & Loss by department page.