Using Claude with Xero in Australia: a guide

1. Three ways to connect

Xero states the first one plainly on its own page: Claude reads your data and cannot change it. Xero also has its own assistant, JAX, inside Xero. This paper is about Claude.

2. What reading is genuinely good for

We sell a product that chases debtors from Xero, so read this knowing that: for most owners, the free read-only connector is the right first step, and it costs nothing.

• “Who owes me more than $5,000, and since when?”
• “Which customers have paid late three times this year?”
• “How does this month’s cash compare with the same month last year?”

Questions like these used to be a report, an export and a spreadsheet. Read-only is also the right default for a ledger: there is no version of a misread question that ends in a changed invoice.

3. The route that can write

Xero publishes an open-source MCP server under the MIT licence. It can create invoices, contacts, payments, credit notes, quotes and manual journals, and update drafts. It authenticates with a Xero custom connection or a token rather than the one-click sign-in the Claude connector uses, so it is a job for someone who sets up software, not a toggle.

Anything that can create a payment or a journal can make a mess an accountant has to unpick. If you use it, scope it to the fewest actions the job needs, and keep a person approving every write.

4. Knowing a debt is not chasing it

The debtor book does not get shorter because someone looked at it. It gets shorter when the customer is contacted, on the right day, with the right opener, and agrees a date. Every route above waits for a person to ask.

That is the honest gap. The ledger can tell an assistant who is on day seven. Something still has to act on day seven when nobody is looking, and write down what the customer said.

5. Open skills for receivables

An Agent Skill is a folder of instructions Claude loads before a task. Two open sets cover receivables, and they do different jobs.

Computing the figures. accounts-receivable-skills, published under MIT by Paidnice’s co-founder, works out aged receivables, DSO, late fee schedules and statements with a tested script rather than the model. That is the right design for numbers, and we would point you at it. Paidnice makes the same point we do: the skill answers when asked, and their product does the enforcing.

The rules of the chase. The Debtor Chasing standard is ours, free under CC BY 4.0, and it sets what any chase must never do: invent an amount instead of reading the live ledger, chase an invoice the ledger shows as paid, take bank details on a call, pressure a customer in hardship, or dial without a basis and a register check. It ships as a skill from our repository. The two sets fit together: one gets the numbers right, the other says what may be done with them.

When Xero and the job system disagree. Once a connector can write into the job system from a chat and Xero is read from another, the two drift. The Two Records standard covers that: it joins on ids, never on a name or an amount, shows every mismatch with both values, and corrects nothing until a person accepts it.

6. What stays with a person

Whichever route you take, three decisions should not be handed to an assistant:

• Disputes. A customer who says the work was wrong needs a person, not a reminder.
• Hardship and payment plans. Both carry obligations, and the compliance paper covers what applies.
• Credit policy. Which buckets get chased, when to stop, and who escalates. Write it down once; the assistant follows it.

And one trap that catches every first build: the invoice the customer paid yesterday that has not been reconciled yet. Read the ledger on the day, never from a list made last week.

7. For accountants and bookkeepers

Clients will connect Claude to their own files whether a practice recommends it or not. The useful position is to have an answer ready: read-only through Xero’s connector is low risk and worth encouraging, and anything that writes to the ledger should go through the practice first. Agents that sign in with a person’s own login, like Grok Bot, are a different question again; we cover it in should you give Grok Bot your Xero login.

A client who asks Claude “am I owed much?” and gets a good answer still has to make the calls. That is where the practice conversation starts.

8. Where a paid product still earns its fee

Not for the connection, which is free, and not for the figures, which an open skill computes. For three things:

• The call itself, with the AI disclosure, consent and register check done properly.
• Running on day seven without anyone asking.
• The record: the promise as a date, the dispute handed to a person, and the trail behind both.

That is what our overdue invoice calls do. Get Paid, $199 a month, reads the live Xero ledger just before each call and writes the promised date back to the invoice. If a monthly look and your own phone calls are keeping the book short, you do not need it.

9. Where to start

Add Xero’s connector and ask it one question: which invoices over 30 days are larger than your average job. That list is the debtor book that matters.

Then read the Debtor Chasing standard for the order to work through it, and the receivables paper for the rest of the workflow.