Negative Values for Expense Accounts from Xero

In some cases, expenses are displayed as a negative number in the Profit & Loss which is causing the income is overstated by twice the operating expenses.

There is a way to fix this by changing the account type in Xero. Going to Settings > Chart of Accounts, click the Account Name to edit it, use the drop-down arrow to change Expense to Overhead, then click on the green Save button to save the changes. Once all of the Expense accounts are changed to Overhead, the values will go from negative to positive. It will be tedious to change all of the accounts, but once it's done they won't have to manually adjust their Excel sheets anymore.

Below is the explaination from the Xero Support Team:

I've logged into your organization and I can see that the Income Statement is showing the expenses in the Other Income and Expenses section in brackets.

This is due to the fact that account codes that are set up as Other Income are also displayed in this section, so the brackets are used to differentiate the income from the expenses in this category.

So that your Expense accounts will not show in brackets, you can update the account types of these accounts to Overheads.

When you do this Xero will create another section in the Income Statement for Operating Expenses where the Overhead accounts will sit and they won't be in brackets.

This display is due to some adjustments with the report display in our US edition to align with GAAP reporting requirements.  You can read further details about this in the Help Center link below.

Xero Help Center: Updated income statement and balance sheet layouts (US)