XPM Business Structures: What SG Can Send Back
This article is about the push direction — StructureGram sending a client to XPM. For the other direction, see Custom Business Structures from XPM and Automatic Type Matching.
The two directions are not symmetric, and that asymmetry is the thing worth understanding. StructureGram can recognise far more structures than it can send.
Why the two directions differ
When StructureGram reads from XPM, it must cope with whatever your practice has configured — including business structures your practice invented. Recognising a label is safe: the worst case is that SG asks you which SG type it means.
Sending is different. XPM validates the structure on write and rejects anything outside its own list, with an error like:
XPM rejected the client mutation: Invalid Business Structure - Testamentary Trust
So the set SG can send is deliberately smaller than the set it can read.
What XPM accepts on write
| SG entity type | Sent to XPM as |
|---|---|
| Individual | Individual |
| Company | Company |
| Partnership | Partnership |
| SMSF | Self Managed Superannuation Fund |
| Trust — Unit | Unit Trust |
| Trust — Deceased Estate | Estate |
| Trust — PAF or Charitable | Not for Profit |
| Trust — anything else (Discretionary, Testamentary, Bare, Special Disability, unspecified) | Trust |
What this means for trust subtypes
XPM has three trust-shaped structures: Trust, Unit Trust and Estate. StructureGram has many more.
Where XPM has no matching structure, SG sends the closest one it accepts and keeps your subtype locally. Your StructureGram record is unchanged — a Testamentary Trust stays a Testamentary Trust in SG, and only the value sent to XPM is generalised.
Two consequences to be aware of:
- The subtype does not survive a round trip. Push a Testamentary Trust and it lands in XPM as "Trust". Import that client back into a different SG workspace and the subtype is gone, because XPM never stored it.
- Testamentary and Discretionary trusts are indistinguishable in XPM. Both are "Trust" there. If your practice relies on telling them apart inside XPM, that distinction has to live in the client's name or a custom field.
Deceased Estate is the exception worth knowing. It maps to XPM's Estate, which is a genuinely distinct structure. A testamentary trust is not sent as Estate — an estate is the administration of a deceased person's assets, while a testamentary trust is the ongoing trust the will creates. See Deceased Estate Trusts.
Custom structures cannot be sent by default
If your practice defined its own structure in XPM — "Discretionary Trust", "Trustee Company", "Individual Trustee" are real examples — StructureGram will happily import clients on it. It will not send it.
The reason is that a custom structure exists only in the practice that created it. A value that works in your XPM would be rejected by another, so SG does not treat custom labels as sendable.
If you want SG to send one of your custom structures, save a mapping rule for it. A saved rule is a deliberate statement that this practice has that structure, and SG will honour it on push. See Custom Business Structures from XPM for how to create and manage rules.
Without a rule, SG falls back to the standard structure for that entity type and flags the client for review, rather than sending a value it expects XPM to refuse.
Structures StructureGram has no type for
XPM's list includes some structures StructureGram has no equivalent for: Club or Society, Government Entity, Other, and a non-SMSF Superannuation Fund.
SG will not guess at these. On import it asks you to choose the closest SG entity type; that choice is remembered for the whole practice. There is no automatic conversion, because recording a club as a company would put something inaccurate into a system whose value is structural accuracy.
If a push is rejected
An Invalid Business Structure failure appears in the reconciliation failures list with XPM's own message. It means SG sent a value XPM would not take.
- Check whether the client's SG type has a saved mapping rule pointing at a custom structure that no longer exists in XPM.
- If so, delete or correct the rule, then retry the push.
- If not, note the exact structure named in the error and raise it — SG's accepted list may need extending.
Related Topics
- Custom Business Structures from XPM — the import direction and mapping rules
- Automatic Type Matching for XPM Structures — how keywords resolve a structure
- Push to Xero Practice Manager — what a push sends and when
- Data Required to Import from XPM — trust subtype requirements on import