Xero Accounting API
Xero is a cloud accounting platform for small and medium businesses. Its API provides programmatic access to invoices, contacts, bank transactions, expenses, payroll, fixed assets, and financial reports, enabling accounting automation and integrations.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
OAuth2 with organization-specific scopes. SOC2 Type II, ISO27001. Financial data — extremely sensitive. Connection authorized per organization. 30-minute access tokens with refresh tokens.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
An agent needs to manage accounting data, generate invoices, or reconcile transactions for a small or medium business already using Xero.
Avoid When
The business uses QuickBooks, Sage, or other accounting software — data migration adds significant friction.
Use Cases
- • Automated invoice creation and payment tracking
- • Bank reconciliation automation
- • Expense claim processing and approval workflows
- • Financial report generation (P&L, balance sheet)
- • Contact and supplier management
- • Multi-currency accounting and FX reconciliation
Not For
- • Large enterprise ERP needs (Xero targets SMBs; lacks some enterprise features)
- • US payroll (Xero Payroll is limited to certain regions)
- • Real-time payment processing (use Stripe or similar for payments)
Interface
Authentication
OAuth2 with PKCE for user authorization. Scopes are granular per resource area (accounting.transactions, accounting.contacts, payroll.employees, etc.). Tokens expire after 30 minutes; refresh tokens valid for 60 days. Multi-tenant support — one app can connect to multiple Xero organisations, each with its own tenantId that must be passed on every API call.
Pricing
30-day free trial available. App connections require the merchant to have an active Xero subscription. Partner apps can be built for free but require merchant subscription for production use.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ tenantId must be passed on every API call — missing this is the most common agent error
- ⚠ Access tokens expire after 30 minutes — agents must implement token refresh proactively
- ⚠ 60 calls/minute per organisation limit is easy to hit when syncing large datasets
- ⚠ Modified-since filtering is critical for incremental sync — otherwise agents re-fetch all data
- ⚠ Xero uses GUID-based IDs everywhere — agents must resolve names to GUIDs before referencing
- ⚠ Multi-tenant apps must store and manage tenantId separately from the OAuth token
- ⚠ Some fields are region-specific (TaxType values vary by country) — hardcoding values causes cross-region failures
- ⚠ Webhook verification requires HMAC-SHA256 signature checking; event delivery is not guaranteed exactly-once
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.