Custom Business Structures from XPM
Xero Practice Manager (XPM) lets each practice define its own business structures for clients — beyond the standard ones. When you pull or sync those clients into StructureGram (SG), SG needs to know which of its entity types (Individual, Company, Trust, SMSF, or Partnership) each XPM structure corresponds to.
This article explains how SG classifies a custom structure — trying to match it automatically by keyword first, then remembering your manual choice as a mapping rule — and how to manage or delete those rules.
For how the pull works overall, see How to Pull Data from XPM; for comparing the two systems, see XPM Reconciliation.
How StructureGram Classifies a Structure
SG works through these in order and uses the first that succeeds:
- Standard structures — the built-in XPM types SG already knows, mapped with no prompt.
- Saved mapping rules — a custom structure you previously classified, resolved from your organisation's saved rule (see below).
- Keyword matching — SG reads keywords in the business-structure label and auto-matches where it safely can, flagging the item for review. See Automatic Type Matching for the full keyword lists and rules.
- Ask you to choose — if none of the above resolves it, SG holds the client until you pick an SG entity type.
Structures StructureGram Recognises Automatically
You only need to do anything for custom structures. SG already recognises the standard XPM business structures and maps them without asking, including:
- Individual
- Company
- Trust (and common variants such as Unit Trust, Testamentary Trust, and Estate)
- Partnership
- SMSF
- Not For Profit
Anything your practice has defined in XPM that isn't one of these is treated as a custom business structure — and SG will try to auto-match it by keyword before asking you.
Choosing an SG Entity Type for a Custom Structure
When SG can't match a custom structure by keyword — or the keywords point to conflicting answers (for example a label containing both "Trust" and "Pty Ltd") — it won't guess. In that case SG asks you to choose the matching SG entity type during the import review, before the client is created.
Pick the SG entity type that best matches how that structure should appear in your diagrams:
- If the structure represents a person → Individual
- If it represents a company → Company
- If it represents a trust → Trust (you may also be asked to choose the trust type, e.g. discretionary or unit)
- and so on for SMSF or Partnership.
Once you make the choice, the client imports as that SG entity type.
Tip: If a custom structure represents a person but XPM carries no first/last name, SG imports it as an Individual with placeholder names (
[FirstName]/[LastName]) so you can fill them in later — it won't cram an organisation name into the name fields.
The Mapping Rule (Remembered for Next Time)
Your choice isn't a one-off. SG saves it as a mapping rule — "this XPM business structure → this SG entity type" — for your organisation. From then on:
- Every later import of a client with that same business structure is classified automatically, with no prompt.
- Sync and reconciliation use the rule too. This is important: with the rule in place, a mapped structure is compared using your chosen SG type, so reconciliation won't flag a false "Business Structure differs" just because XPM's raw label doesn't match SG's vocabulary.
Mapping rules are shared across your organisation, so once one person classifies a structure, everyone benefits from it.
Managing and Deleting Mapping Rules
You can review and remove your organisation's mapping rules at any time:
- Go to Account Settings.
- Open the Integrations tab.
- Select Xero-XPM Integration.
- Scroll to Custom Business Structure mapping rules.
Each rule is shown as "XPM business structure → SG entity type" (for example, Body Corporate → Company). To remove one, click the trash icon next to it and confirm.
What deleting a rule does:
- The next import of an XPM client with that business structure will ask you to choose the SG entity type again.
- It does not change entities you've already imported — those keep whatever entity type they were created as. Deleting a rule only affects how future imports of that structure are classified.
If you classified a structure incorrectly, delete the rule and re-import (or re-run the pull) so you're prompted to choose the correct SG entity type, which then saves a corrected rule.
Who Can Manage Mapping Rules
Creating a rule happens naturally for anyone who can run a pull and review imports. Managing (deleting) existing rules follows your XPM integration permissions — see XPM Permissions by Member Role. If you don't see the delete option, you may not have the required role.