Payment Triage: Pull Every Direct Cost Back Into the Budget

Not every dollar that leaves a job passes through a purchase order. Direct debits, rent, utilities, statutory fees, insurances, super and reimbursements often get paid straight out of Xero with no PO ever raised. The money is gone, but the commitment was never captured in Deep Space, so the budget quietly under-reports what the job has actually spent. Payment Triage closes that gap. It reads your actioned Xero payments and lets you reverse-generate an internal PO from a payment after the fact, allocate it to the right project and cost code, and land the cost against the budget where it belongs. Why direct cost allocation matters A budget is only as accurate as the costs flowing into it. Every payment that skips the PO workflow is a dollar the project forecast cannot see: cost-to-complete drifts, committed cost looks lighter than it is, and margin is overstated until month-end catches it. The old fix was a spreadsheet and a person cross-checking Xero against the job. That is slow, error-prone, and exactly the absence-of-POs commercial risk builders keep raising. Payment Triage makes direct costs first-class: allocate the payment, generate the PO, and the cost lands against the cost code in the same ledger as everything else. Before A cost paid directly in Xero was a blind spot. With no matching PO it never hit committed cost, and the only way to reconcile was to export from Xero and line it up against the budget register by hand. After Open Payment Triage and every Xero payment is waiting. Pick one, confirm the project, and split it across one or more cost codes until it balances. Choose Generate internal PO and the commitment is written back against the budget. The generated PO carries an explicit audit trail. It is stamped Generated from an authorised Xero payment after cash movement, so anyone reviewing the commercials can see exactly where the commitment came from and why it exists.Impact Direct costs stop leaking out of the forecast. Committed and actual cost reflect what the job has genuinely spent, accounts closes the loop between Xero and the project without re-keying, and the time once lost to manual reconciliation comes back. The budget becomes something you can trust at any point in the month, not just after a clean-up. How to use it Admin > Finance > Payment Triage, then the Xero payments tab. Select a payment, set the project and cost allocation until it reads Balanced, and choose Generate internal PO. Requires your Xero integration to be connected. Known limitations (v1) This is the first release and is aimed at admin and accounting users. Right now it generates a purchase order from a payment; a dedicated direct-costs model is still to come. Treat it as an early cut and tell us where it needs to go next. This is the first mission for Payment Triage, and your feedback sets the trajectory. Tell us what is working and what is missing.