How to use Grok Bot for business: set up your first weekly job

1. How to install Grok Bot and set up your first Bot

Grok Bot is xAI’s always-on agent: named Bots you message like a colleague, working on a cloud computer that keeps going after you close the laptop. If you are new to it, start with what Grok Bot is.

1. Check your plan. xAI lists Grok Bot with The X Subscription at Premium, Super and Ultra, a linked SuperGrok or X Premium+ subscription, older paid Cursor plans, and Grok Business seats. Plans have moved since launch, so check the current price on xAI’s own site.
2. Download the app from x.ai/bot, or the Grok Bot page of your Cursor dashboard. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, with a phone app for iPhone and Android.
3. Sign in. Choose Sign in on the welcome screen and finish in your browser. It uses your Cursor account; there is no separate Grok Bot login. On a Grok Business seat, choose Sign in with Grok. With a SuperGrok or X Premium+ subscription, link it under Settings, Usage & Billing.
4. Make a Bot for the job. The first run gives you a Bot called Grok Bot. For business work, make one Bot per job: click + in the sidebar, choose Create a Bot, name it “Monday Debtors” and choose Create.
5. Tell it its one job in its first message, with the rules:

Your one job: every Monday, give me a ranked list of customers with overdue invoices in Xero for [organisation name], so I know who to chase. You only read. Never approve, pay, send or delete anything, and never contact a customer yourself. Ask me before changing anything.

Which job to set up first

Treat a new Bot like a new junior on probation. You would not hand a new starter the payment run in week one. You would give them a job where you can see at a glance whether they got it right, watch the first few, then spot-check. A good first job has four things:

• A right answer. Two careful people would get the same result. “Who owes us money, biggest first” has one; “which customer is unhappy” does not.
• A source you can check. The answer comes from a system with its own report, so you can compare.
• An output a person acts on. A list, a table, a set of drafts. Not an action that leaves the building.
• A fixed rhythm. It happens every Monday, or before every payment run, whether or not anyone remembers.

The worked example. Every Monday at 8am, a list of customers with overdue invoices in Xero, sorted into buckets by how late they are and ranked by what each owes. It passes all four: the right answer is in Xero, Xero’s Aged Receivables report checks it, a person decides who to ring, and it is due every week. The full prompt is on the Xero debtor call list page; this page is the method around it.

2. How to set up Grok Bot’s access without giving it your password

Give it a key, and give the key the least it needs. A key opens only what you tick, it shows up as the Bot rather than as you, and you can delete it without changing your password. Your login does the opposite on all three, and every Bot you have shares the same browser sessions. Why that matters is in is Grok Bot safe.

For the debtor list, we use an Office Voice key. Office Voice is our product. It connects to Xero once through Xero’s own sign-in, and the key works in Grok Bot and in Claude. It can read the book, write promise-to-pay notes into Xero, and it can never approve, send or pay anything. Reading and notes come with Connect at $19 a month per business, which makes no calls. Draft invoices and phone calls come only with Get Paid at $199 a month.

1. Sign in to Office Voice with Xero and pick the organisation.
2. Under Keys, create a key and tick Read the book only. Leave Write drafts and notes and Queue calls off until the list has earned them.
3. Paste this into the Bot’s chat, click Add it, and enter the key in the secure secret card it shows, never in the chat:

Add a custom MCP server called Office Voice at https://office-voice.com/api/mcp

It needs an Authorization header: the word Bearer, a space, then my Office Voice key. Ask me for the key with a secure secret card. Do not ask me to type it in this chat.

One job, one key. If you later add a bill check, give it its own key, so you can switch one off without touching the other. The other ways in, including Xero’s own plugin, are compared in how to connect Grok Bot to Xero.

Running a practice? One key can reach every client organisation, or only the clients you tick. The Bot can read across all of them, and every write names one client. See the practice setup and AI bots for Xero practices. Check the Tax Practitioners Board’s AI guidance before client data goes into any AI tool.

3. How to test Grok Bot before you let it run alone

Before any schedule, ask one read-only question you can check against the source in a minute. For the debtor list:

Using the Office Voice tools for [organisation name], read only: tell me the total of sent invoices past their due date, and the three customers who owe the most. Do not change anything in Xero and do not contact anyone.

1. Open Xero’s Aged Receivables report as at today.
2. The total should match to the cent.
3. The three names should be the same three.

If it matches, run the full prompt from the debtor call list by hand once and read every line. If it does not match, find out why before you go on. Common reasons: the wrong organisation, a credit note left out, or a draft invoice counted as sent. Fix the prompt, not the output. More on this test is in the Grok Bot and Xero guide.

Every job needs a check like this. The bill check is matched against the bills awaiting payment in Xero; the unbilled jobs list against ServiceM8’s completed jobs; the quote list against ServiceM8’s jobs in Quote status. If you cannot think of a one-minute check, the job is not ready for a Bot.

4. How to schedule a job in Grok Bot

Grok Bot splits a scheduled job in two. A skill is the saved method. A routineis when it runs. Routines run on xAI’s cloud computer, so the list is ready at 8am with your laptop closed. Only schedule a prompt that has already given the right answer by hand: the routine will not notice if it has quietly gone wrong.

1. Run the job once by hand in the Bot’s chat until the result is right.
2. In the same chat, ask the Bot to save it as a skill and set up the routine. Give the schedule in plain words, and say what to do if a source is missing:

Save what we just did as a skill called Monday debtor list.

Then set up a routine that runs it every Monday at 8:00 AM. Read only: never approve, pay, send, delete or contact anyone. If Office Voice cannot be reached, or the total is missing, stop and tell me in this chat instead of guessing.

3. Check the time zone under Settings, Bot, Timezone, then read the routine’s When to run field. If it is wrong, choose Edit.
4. A new routine waits for its next scheduled time. Press Testto run it now and read the result in the Bot’s chat.
5. To pause it, click the Bot’s name, open the Detailstab and use the switch on the routine’s row. On the phone, open the Bot’s profile, pick the routine and turn off Active.

xAI’s own guide says to write approval rules into each routine and to require approval for sending, purchasing, deleting or publishing. It also says the Bot may pause routines if you have been away a long time and do not answer, so a silent Monday can mean a paused routine.

Steps as xAI set them out on 30 October 2026. Grok Bot ships a new version most weeks, so expect the odd label to move.

5. How to check Grok Bot’s weekly job once it runs on its own

Five minutes on Monday morning, with the list open:

• Did it run? The result lands in the Bot’s chat. On the phone, the routine’s Run history shows Succeeded or Failed, with a reason for a failure.
• Does the total still match? Every week for the first month, then once a month, against Aged Receivables.
• Do the changes make sense? The prompt marks anyone who dropped off since last week as “paid or cleared”. If a customer you know has not paid is marked cleared, stop and look.
• What did it hold back? Read the exceptions first. They are the part a person is for.

Handle each exception at its root. A customer in a genuine dispute keeps appearing? Add a line to the prompt that leaves out named disputes. A bucket feels wrong? Change the rule in the prompt, not the list. Each fix makes next Monday’s list quicker to read.

Only once the list has been right for a month should the Bot earn more access. For the debtor list, that is ticking Queue calls (which needs Get Paid, $199 a month) and adding the hand-off to Office Voice. The Bot still rings nobody: it hands over a ranked list, and Office Voice places each call inside calling hours after the Do Not Call Register check, says it is an AI, and holds back anyone it should not ring.

6. A prompt template to set up any weekly Grok Bot job

Every recipe on this site follows the same shape. Fill in the brackets and you have a prompt that is safe to schedule:

Job: [one sentence: the result you want, e.g. a ranked list of customers with overdue invoices]
Organisation: [business or client name]

Tools: use only [connection name, e.g. the Office Voice tools]. Read only. Never approve, pay, send, delete or void anything, and never contact anyone.

Steps:
1. [Read this from the source, e.g. call list_overdue]
2. [Sort or check it by these rules, e.g. buckets by oldest invoice]
3. [Rank it, e.g. by total overdue, largest first]

Save the result as [job-name]-YYYY-MM-DD.csv. If last week's file is there, mark what has changed since.

Check figure: give me one total I can match against [the source's own report, e.g. Xero's Aged Receivables].

Exceptions: if a source cannot be reached, a figure looks wrong, or something does not fit the rules, stop and list it for me. Do not guess and do not fix it yourself.

Return: [what you want to read, e.g. the top ten as a table and the total].

Why each line is there:

• Job and organisation stop it working on the wrong book, which matters most in a practice.
• Tools and never repeat what the key already enforces. The key is the lock; the line is the sign on the door.
• Steps are the rules you would give a person, in order.
• Save with a date gives next week something to compare against, which is how drift shows up.
• Check figure is step 3, built into every run.
• Exceptions make the Bot stop and tell you instead of guessing at 8am with nobody watching.

7. When to stop a Grok Bot routine, and what never to schedule

Pause the routine when:

• The check figure does not match, two weeks running.
• The source changes: a new Xero organisation, a new job system, a new chart of accounts.
• Nobody has read the output for three weeks. An unread list is just noise.
• The job has gone, or someone now does it by hand.

If a key may have leaked, delete it first and ask questions after. The Bot loses access at once and your password never changes. Deleting a routine cannot be undone, so pause it if you might want it back.

Never schedule anything that pays, sends or deletes. That means payment runs, approving bills, emailing or texting customers, sending invoices, and voiding or deleting records. Each is hard to undo, and a schedule means nobody is watching when it happens. A scheduled Bot reads, sorts and drafts. A person approves and sends.

Do not rely on the prompt for this. Give the Bot a key that cannot do those things at all. The Office Voice key can never approve, send or pay. If you use Xero’s own plugin instead, its scopes can include payments, so tick only what the job needs. And no connector can reconcile your bank: Xero does not give ordinary apps the unreconciled bank feed lines.

8. Do the same steps work in Claude?

Yes. The job, the key, the test, the template and the weekly check are identical; the same Office Voice key works in both. Only the schedule button differs. In Claude, on any paid plan, click Scheduled in the left sidebar, then New task, and pick a frequency: hourly, daily, weekly, weekdays or manual. Claude’s help centre says tasks run remotely, so they run with your computer asleep, unless the task needs files or apps on your computer.

Adding the key to Claude is in our guide to Claude with Xero, and the two are compared in Grok Bot or Claude for a business.

9. Four weekly jobs to set up in Grok Bot next

Each recipe has the prompt, the schedule and the check for one job. The five steps are the same in every one:

Start with one. Add the second only when the first has run clean for a month and you still read it every week.

10. Questions