How to backfill missing months in your Xero bank feed

Xero's bank feeds are great from the day you connect them — and silent about everything before. Most feeds backfill somewhere between nothing and 90 days, so a business that connects Xero in July has a January-to-April hole that no amount of waiting will fill. The fix is a statement import, and done in the right order it's an hour's work.

1. Find the exact edge of the feed

In Xero, open the bank account and note the earliest feed transaction. Your import must end the day before — one day of overlap is the most common cause of duplicates.

2. Convert the missing months

Gather the statement PDFs for the gap and convert them with NoRekey — batches are fine, scans are fine, and each month is verified against its own opening and closing balances before you download. Export CSV: Xero's importer is CSV-first and its column mapper is excellent.

3. Import into Xero

1. Go to Accounting → Bank accounts, pick the account, then Import a Statement.
2. Upload the CSV.
3. Map the columns (Date, Description/Payee, Amount — or separate spent/received columns) and confirm the date format.
4. Import, then reconcile the new rows as usual.

Xero imports statement lines rather than posted transactions, so everything lands in the reconciliation screen where you'd expect it.

4. Check the join

Two ten-second checks make the backfill trustworthy. First, the earliest imported month's opening balance should match the account's balance in Xero at that date (set the conversion balance if this is a brand-new Xero org). Second, the last imported day's closing balance should flow into the first feed transaction with no gap and no overlap. If both line up, the history and the feed are one continuous, reconcilable record.

The traps

• Overlap duplicates — trim any imported rows that the feed also delivered; Xero won't always catch them for CSV imports.
• The missing-week gap — statements run on statement periods, not calendar months. If the feed starts mid-period, you may need to trim a partial month's CSV to the exact cut-off date.
• Multi-currency accounts — import in the account's own currency; Xero handles the revaluation.

The full software walkthrough lives in our help centre: importing into Xero. And if the gap is more like a year than a quarter, work through it month by month — that's a catch-up job, and it has its own rhythm.