Who Xero is
Xero is a cloud accounting platform founded in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2006, where it is still headquartered, and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. It brings accounting, payroll and payments together for small businesses, and connects to other business apps through its app store.
Its users are mostly small and growing businesses, along with the accountants and bookkeepers who keep their books. Its Accounting API lets an app the business has authorised post journals into its organisation, which is why Xero is one of the accounting systems our Ledger module connects to.
What it does in your platform
Ledger
Receives the ledger's daily totals as manual journals on your Xero chart of accounts, so your accountant closes the month with the same numbers the platform runs on. The individual entries behind every line stay in the ledger, where an auditor can replay any day.
How the connection works
One connector in the Ledger module talks to Xero's Accounting API. Someone in your finance team authorises it once through Xero's OAuth 2.0 sign-in, and from then on it works with short-lived access tokens for your organisation only.
The day is booked
Every card payment, transfer and trade is recorded in the ledger as balanced debits and credits, in real time.
The day is reconciled
The ledger matches the day against bank statements and processor files, and any difference goes to a queue in the backoffice.
A journal is built
The day's movements are summed per ledger account and mapped to your Xero account codes. Debits go in as positive amounts and credits as negative ones, so the lines add up to zero.
Xero receives it
The module sends it to your organisation as a manual journal, either posted or as a draft for your accountant to approve. Xero returns the journal's ID, which is kept next to the day's entries.
Your accountant takes over
In Xero, the journal sits with your company's invoices, bills and bank accounts, ready for reconciliation, reporting and the month-end close.
Next to other providers
Xero holds your company's books, not every customer's movement. It receives daily totals, while a data warehouse such as BigQuery or Snowflake can hold every entry for analysis, and a core banking system, where you run one, stays the book of record for customer accounts.
Moving later to another accounting system, or to an ERP such as NetSuite or SAP, is a change of connector. The ledger and its history stay as they are, and your apps do not change.
When Xero fits best
A strong fit when
- Your company's books already live in Xero, or your accountant works in it.
- You want the platform's numbers in your books every day, without spreadsheets in between.
- You want every journal to trace back to the ledger day that produced it.
Also worth a look
- QuickBooks, if that is the accounting system your accountant prefers.
- NetSuite or SAP, once you consolidate several companies, currencies and approval chains.
How we get you live
The contract
We help you get your Xero account and contract in place, or connect the Xero organisation your accountant already uses.
The mapping
We map every ledger account to a Xero account code with your accountant, and agree when journals post and whether they arrive as drafts.
The keys
The app's OAuth credentials and refresh tokens stay in your platform's secrets, never in a spreadsheet or an inbox.
A full test run
A test ledger posts its journals into a separate Xero organisation first, so your accountant can check every line before the live books are connected.
