Everyone has a Xero integration. Xero itself ships an AI connector now. If all you want is to ask your own Xero file what the P&L looks like, you are well served and do not need us.
The question Xero cannot answer on its own is the one that actually keeps business owners up at night: which jobs did we invoice that never got paid? Xero knows what was invoiced and what landed. Your job management system knows which job each invoice came from. Nobody has both open at once. And for the bookkeeper running twenty client files, a different question again: which of my clients has a pay run due this week that nobody has reviewed?
This post is about a Xero AI assistant built for those two situations. Xero alongside the system where the work actually happens, and Xero across many client organisations at once. Both are different products from a single business chatting to its own ledger, and both are largely unserved.
Credit where it is due. Xero’s own reporting is good, its AI features are improving, and a hundred third-party tools will draw you a chart of aged receivables. If the P&L, the balance sheet or the bank reconciliation screen answers your question, use it.
Two kinds of question sit outside that. The first is any question that needs a second system: the jobs behind the invoices, the people behind the payroll journal, the bills sitting in an inbox that may or may not already be entered. The second is any question across more than one Xero organisation, which is the daily reality of every accountant and bookkeeper and which Xero, by design, does not do. Each file is its own world.
Those are the gaps worth building for. A generic “connect Xero to AI” tool is not interesting and would not rank if it were. This is the specific version.
We connect Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to Xero through an open standard called the Model Context Protocol. You ask in plain English, in Microsoft Teams or the Claude app, and Claude answers from the live organisation. With your approval it drafts invoices, reminders and journals. It never sends or posts on its own.
Three things about how it is built.
It reads the live organisation. Not an extract into a warehouse. The payment that landed at 11am is in the 11:05am answer.
It acts as you, across the organisations you are authorised for. A business owner sees their file. A bookkeeper sees the client files they hold access to, and can ask across all of them in one conversation. Nobody gets a pooled copy of everyone’s ledger.
It knows which button it is not allowed to press. Posting a pay run files Single Touch Payroll with the ATO and cannot be undone. The assistant reviews the run and stops. A person posts. We think an assistant that knows its limits is far more sellable than one claiming to do everything, and every bookkeeper we have shown this to has agreed.
The managed AI service around it handles the connector, the access model, the logging of every question and the tuning against your data. For accounting firms it sits alongside the IT support we already provide to finance and accounting practices in Perth.
“Run me a month-end review for August.”
The P&L for the month with a three-month trend and any line that moved more than 20% called out. The balance sheet as at month end with bank balances cross-checked. Receivables and payables grouped by contact with anything 60 or more days overdue flagged. A count of what is still unreconciled. Then a plain-English summary and a list of what a bookkeeper should action. That is a Xero month-end checklist that runs itself and hands you the exceptions.
“Who is overdue by more than a fortnight?”
Overdue invoices grouped by customer with ageing. It also checks what reminders have already gone out, so nobody gets nagged twice.
“Show me the aged receivables as a chart.”
“Which customers have slipped from paying on time to paying late?”
That last one is the early warning every business wants and never has time to compute.
“What is not reconciled on the main account, and what do you think it matches?”
Unreconciled transactions matched against candidate invoices by amount and date, presented as a table with a confidence column, for a person to confirm. Finding unreconciled Xero transactions and suggesting matches is the bookkeeping equivalent of having someone lay out the pieces before you start.
“Find that invoice with the switchboard on it.”
Searches across nine record types and scans line-item descriptions too. It works when nobody remembers the customer or the number, which is most of the time.
“Check this pay run before I post it.”
Every payslip compared against the employee’s pay template and approved leave. It flags missing timesheets, anything more than 25% off the previous run, and terminated employees still appearing. Exceptions listed. Then it stops, because posting is yours.
Reviewing a Xero pay run before posting is a recurring, high-anxiety task that most small businesses do by eyeballing the summary screen. Having every payslip checked against what it should be, and the odd ones surfaced, is a different level of comfort.
“Show me the cash position.”
Cash position, financial position, P&L, aged balances, top customers and invoices owed come back as interactive views in the chat rather than walls of numbers.
“Bill Acme 3 hours consulting at $150, due in 14 days.”
Becomes a draft invoice with the right account code and tax rate, previewed for approval. Drafts, not sends.
“Draft the reminder emails for everyone over 30 days.”
“Record the payment against invoice INV-0412.”
“Set up the repeating invoice for the monthly retainer.”
And the one it will not do: post a pay run. It reviews, it lists exceptions, it stops. STP filing is a legal act with the ATO and a person makes it.
This is the angle the whole post is built around. Xero on its own is served by a hundred tools. Xero plus the system where the work actually happens is served by none of them, because every one of those tools only sees Xero.
For a trade contractor running Simpro, ServiceM8 or Aroflo, the money leaks in the gap between the two systems.
“Which jobs have been invoiced but not paid?”
“Reconcile this month’s job invoices against what has landed in the bank.”
“What did we quote, what did we invoice, and what did we actually get paid?”
Three numbers, three places, one sentence. We covered the contractor’s side of this in our post on connecting Simpro to an AI assistant.
“Does the payroll journal in Xero match the people and pay rates in the HR system?”
“Who has had a pay rise approved in HR that has not flowed through to payroll yet?”
“Does the bonus we calculated from the KPI numbers match what was actually paid?”
Every one of those is a question a business owner assumes someone is checking. Usually nobody is.
“Go through the bills sitting in the AP inbox and tell me which are already in Xero and which still need entering.”
“This customer is querying an invoice. Pull it up, find the job it came from, and draft the reply with the detail.”
“File the signed contract against this customer and link it to the invoice.”
This is the least contested corner of the whole Xero market, and the one we think is most under-built.
“Across all my clients, who has a pay run due this week that has not been reviewed?”
“Which client files have unreconciled transactions older than 60 days?”
“Which of my clients has BAS due this month and is not reconciled to the end of the quarter?”
A Xero AI assistant for accountants that moves between client organisations in one conversation is a different product from a business talking to its own file. It turns twenty separate morning checks into one question, and it surfaces the client who is about to become a problem before they ring you.
Xero alongside Microsoft 365 (email, Teams, SharePoint), Simpro and Employment Hero runs today. If your job system or HR system is something else, that is a build rather than a blocker.
Connecting an AI model to the Xero API is not hard. The hard part is that every ledger has places where the data quietly lies. Contacts duplicated with slightly different spellings, so one customer’s ageing is split across three. A tracking category half the team applies. Invoices voided and re-issued, so the “unpaid” count is right and the “sent” count is wrong. A clearing account that has drifted for eight months.
Point a generic AI at that and ask who owes you money, and you will get a confident, specific, slightly wrong number. It will look completely reasonable. Nobody will check, because not checking was the point.
Making a Xero AI assistant trustworthy means measuring the data against itself, writing down where it misleads, and building those traps into the answers. When ours reports ageing, it says whether it has merged obvious duplicate contacts. When it reviews a pay run, it says which comparison it used. That is what an integration specialist is for, and it is the part no self-serve connector gives you, because it does not know your file.
Two readers. First, the business owner running Xero next to an operational system, a job manager, an HR platform, a busy AP inbox, who wants the cross-system questions answered. Second, the accountant or bookkeeper running many client files who wants to ask across all of them at once.
We are a Perth managed IT provider and we deliver this hands-on, so WA businesses and practices are who we work with most. Xero does not care where you are and neither does the connector. If you are interstate and these are your questions, talk to us and we will say plainly whether we can deliver it well.
One thing we are not: a Xero app partner. We do not sell Xero, we do not implement it, and this is not a Xero product. It is an AI assistant we build and run that connects to your Xero organisation with your authorisation.
Write down the cross-system question you keep meaning to check. Invoiced versus paid by job. Payroll journal versus HR pay rates. Bills in the inbox versus bills in Xero. The one you assume someone checks and suspect nobody does. That is the brief.
If you are a bookkeeper, count your morning. How many client files do you open before 10am, and what are you looking for in each? If it is the same three things twenty times, that is exactly what the cross-file questions replace.
Watch it review a pay run. We have a working demonstration against realistic Xero organisations. Bring the question you ask most and watch it answered live, including the review that stops before posting. Twenty minutes, no commitment. Contact us on 1300 EPIC IT or through the contact page.
Yes. A Xero AI assistant built for practices connects to every client organisation the user is authorised for and lets them ask across all of them in one conversation, for example which clients have unreviewed pay runs due this week or unreconciled transactions older than 60 days. Ours respects each user’s Xero authorisations and logs every question.
Ask the assistant to check it. Every payslip is compared against the employee’s pay template and approved leave, and it flags missing timesheets, anything more than 25% different from the previous run, and terminated employees still appearing. It lists the exceptions and stops. Posting, which files STP with the ATO, stays with a person.
Yes. With both connected you can ask which Simpro jobs have been invoiced but not paid, reconcile the month’s job invoices against what landed in the bank, and compare quoted, invoiced and banked figures in one question. Neither system can answer those alone.
Ask “What is not reconciled on the main account, and what do you think it matches?” The assistant lists unreconciled transactions with candidate invoices matched by amount and date and a confidence rating, laid out for a person to confirm. Across client files, you can ask which organisations have unreconciled items older than a given age.
It drafts them. “Draft the reminder emails for everyone over 30 days” prepares a reminder per customer, checking what has already been sent so nobody is chased twice. A person reviews and sends. We deliberately do not build assistants that send financial correspondence unsupervised.
No. We are not a Xero app partner and this is not a Xero product. It is an AI assistant we build and operate that connects to your Xero organisation using your own authorisation, alongside your other business systems.
