How to automate WIP and utilisation reporting in Xero Practice Manager or Actionstep

What does an automated WIP and utilisation report do?

An automated WIP and utilisation report takes time, jobs and invoices from your practice-management system on a schedule, calculates each metric the same way every week and delivers the result to partners. Nobody exports, cleans or re-keys data. The practice manager gets Monday morning back, and partners stop debating whose spreadsheet is right.

For most Australian accounting firms the source is Xero Practice Manager (XPM), which Xero now offers as the practice management part of Xero Partner Hub. XPM already records jobs, timesheets and invoices, and includes WIP and productivity reporting. Law firms on Actionstep have the same raw material: time and fee entries, WIP and aged receivables, listed on Actionstep’s reporting page. The method below works for both. The gap is rarely the data. It is agreed definitions and a reliable route from the system to the partners’ inbox.

Which metrics belong in the weekly report?

Four metrics cover most partner conversations about capacity and cash: work in progress, utilisation, recoverability and lock-up. Write a one-line definition for each and have the partners sign it off before anything is built, because most arguments about “the numbers” are really arguments about definitions.

Each definition hides a decision. Does training count as available time? Is time spent on proposals for new clients chargeable? Is recoverability measured when a job is invoiced, or month by month? There is no universal answer, only your firm’s answer, written down and applied every week.

How is each metric calculated? A worked example

The arithmetic is simple once the definitions are fixed. The figures below are illustrative: one week for one senior accountant in a 25-person firm, and the firm as a whole at month end.

Utilisation. Contracted hours are 38. The accountant takes one day of annual leave (7.6 hours), so available hours are 30.4. They record 24.3 chargeable hours. Utilisation is 24.3 ÷ 30.4 = 80%.

Recoverability. Jobs invoiced this month carried $12,000 of time at standard rates. The invoices on those jobs total $10,200 excluding GST. Recoverability is 10,200 ÷ 12,000 = 85%, so $1,800 of time was written off.

Lock-up. Annual fees are $4.2 million, so average daily fees are about $11,507. WIP of $420,000 is 36.5 WIP days. Debtors of $341,000 including GST are $310,000 excluding GST, or 26.9 debtor days. Lock-up is about 63 days.

Two details are easy to get wrong. The first is the denominator. XPM’s dashboard shows productivity targets against actual billable time, and a report that divides chargeable hours by hours recorded measures something different from one that divides by hours available. Someone who records 20 chargeable hours and nothing else in a 38-hour week looks fully productive on hours recorded but is 53% utilised on hours available. Check which one your current report uses.

The second is GST. Debtor balances in Xero include GST, while fees and WIP are normally reported excluding it. Strip GST from debtors (divide by 1.1 where all fees are taxable) or gross up fees, but do the same thing every week so the trend means something.

How do you automate the report, step by step?

Automating the report takes six steps, and only two of them are technical. The rest is agreeing definitions and fixing the habits that feed the data.

1. Sign off the definitions. Put the table above, adapted to your firm, in front of the partners and get a yes. Record who approved it and when.
2. Fix the inputs. Set a timesheet deadline, such as 10 am Monday for the previous week. Keep charge-out rates current, record contracted hours and leave where the report can read them, and process write-offs when jobs are invoiced so dead time does not sit in WIP for months.
3. Choose how data leaves the system. The next section covers the options; this is where XPM and Actionstep differ most.
4. Build and reconcile. Load the data into a model, calculate each metric from the signed-off definitions, and reconcile against XPM’s own WIP report and Xero’s aged receivables for the same date until they agree to the dollar. Keep a weekly snapshot, because WIP and debtors are point-in-time balances and trends need history.
5. Schedule delivery. Refresh overnight and send the report before the partners’ meeting, as a PDF or in Power BI. On shared capacity (Power BI Pro) a semantic model can refresh up to eight times a day (Microsoft Learn), and email subscriptions can send partners a weekly snapshot.
6. Add exceptions and owners. Flag WIP older than 60 days, jobs where recoverability is below target and staff with missing timesheets. Name one person who owns the definitions and one who owns the connections.

How do you get the data out of XPM or Actionstep?

There are three routes out of XPM, and the right one depends on how much manual effort you will accept and how much approval work you will take on. Xero changed the terms for its APIs in 2026, so check the current position before committing to a build.

• Exports from saved reports. XPM lets you build custom reports, which can be exported to Excel or CSV into a shared folder that the report reads. It is cheap and quick to start, but someone still runs the export each week.
• An app that already has access. Some reporting apps already hold approved XPM API access and can supply the data. Check exactly what they read, where they store it and what they cost.
• A direct integration. Xero’s security standard for API consumers requires every consumer of the XPM API to complete a self-assessment each year. Under Xero’s developer pricing, in effect since 2 March 2026, XPM API access needs use-case approval and starts at the Advanced tier. Xero’s pricing FAQ exempts bespoke integrations built for your own practice from the new pricing; the annual self-assessment still applies.

Actionstep’s API is REST-based, returns JSON and starts with an integrator application, so a scheduled direct connection is practical for law firms once that is in place. Whichever route you choose, ask for read-only access wherever the system offers it. A reporting connection has no reason to change records.

Where does AI help, and where should it stay out?

AI should not do the arithmetic. Metrics must come from fixed formulas, so the same inputs always give the same answer and a partner can trace every figure back to a timesheet or an invoice. A language model that estimates utilisation is the wrong tool.

AI is useful around the report. It can draft a short commentary on the week’s exceptions for the practice manager to check before it goes to partners, send reminders to staff with missing timesheets, and answer a partner’s follow-up question, such as which jobs drove a drop in recoverability, from the report’s own data. Keep a person between the draft and the partners. If the data comes through Xero’s APIs, note that Xero’s developer terms prohibit using that data to train or contribute to the creation of AI or machine learning models; the restriction is on training models, not on reporting.

What does Pylon Digital build for this?

Pylon Digital’s automated Practice Reporting service is this method delivered as a fixed product: signed-off definitions, read-only connections to XPM, Xero or Actionstep, reconciliation against your own numbers, and a weekly report that we keep running as the firm changes. Report data is stored in fully GDPR-compliant data centres.

If you are still choosing a delivery format, our comparison of Power BI vs Xero reporting for accounting firms sets out the trade-offs. Clean client records make every later report easier, which is one reason to automate client onboarding at the same time. Our page for accounting firms covers the other systems we connect for practices.