Xero

Three strengths

• Accounting, payroll, payments. Its platform unifies accounting, payroll, payments and a wider ecosystem. 1
• A wide API. Its developer tools cover accounting, bank feeds, files, projects and payroll for Australia, New Zealand and the UK. 3
• Over 1,000 apps. Xero reports over 1,000 third-party apps. 2

What it is

Accounting software keeps the record of your money: the invoices you send, the bills you pay, the bank transactions, the payroll. Xero is cloud accounting, which means you use it online and Xero runs the servers. It's a global small business platform that reports 5 million customers in more than 180 countries. 1 The company was founded in 2006 and listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange in June 2007. 2

Researchers who studied cloud accounting in Thai small and medium businesses found that it can make them "more efficient, financially organized, and flexible". They also recommended that businesses integrate cloud accounting with other areas of their operations. 4 That second point is where integration work comes in: accounting software is most useful when the information in it doesn't have to be typed in by hand.

For developers, Xero provides an API (a defined way for one piece of software to talk to another) with official software kits. They cover the Accounting, Assets, Bank feeds, Files, Projects and Payroll interfaces. 3 Access works through OAuth 2.0, the standard sign-in-and-consent process: your user is sent to a consent screen, your app receives a code, and it exchanges the code for an access token. The software can then list the organisations the user has connected to it, and work on each. 3

We choose it because so many businesses already keep their books in it, and because its API lets us put invoices and payments straight into those books.

How we use it

When your books live in Xero, the last thing you want is someone typing the same figures in twice. So we've built integrations that send invoices and payments from your software into your Xero accounts, and your books stay up to date on their own. If your customers pay through Stripe, the payment can carry through to Xero the same way.

That's the heart of Integrations & Automations: joining your systems so information moves between them without anyone retyping it. For you, it means less typing and one set of figures across your systems, which is the efficiency gains and unified systems the service is built around.

References

1. Xero, "About Xero", xero.com. https://www.xero.com/about/ (accessed 29 October 2026)
2. Xero, "Media Factsheet", xero.com. https://www.xero.com/us/media/factsheet/ (accessed 29 October 2026)
3. Xero, "xero-node: Xero Node SDK for OAuth 2.0", GitHub (XeroAPI). https://github.com/XeroAPI/xero-node (accessed 29 October 2026)
4. Dalinee Sastararuji, Danupol Hoonsopon, Pongsakorn Pitchayadol and Pimsiri Chiwamit, "Cloud accounting adoption in Thai SMEs amid the COVID-19 pandemic: an explanatory case study", Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, vol. 11, article 43, 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9209838/ (accessed 29 October 2026)