Most of a practice's day is reading, retyping and first drafts: source documents, client questions, month-end commentary, GST checks. That is where AI earns its keep, and since May 2026 Claude connects to Xero officially.
Take the reading, retyping and first drafts off your team: answering client questions from live Xero data, pulling figures and GST out of receipts and invoices, drafting management report commentary and client emails, and running the checks before a GST return. The judgement and the sign-off stay with you.
The starting point is simpler than most practices expect. Xero has an official, read-only connector in Claude that is free to add, and Xero's open-source MCP server covers the write side - invoices, contacts, bank transactions and payroll timesheets - when you are ready for it.
Trusted by finance teams in New Zealand and Australia
Where AI saves an accounting team real hours - and where a person still has to check the work.
Profit this quarter, cash position, who owes what: Claude answers in plain English from the client's live Xero file and links back to the report or invoice it used. Xero itself pitches this as clients arriving better informed, with fewer basic report requests.
Claude reads receipts, bills and statements, pulls out supplier, amount and GST, spots duplicates and asks which account code and bank account to use before anything is posted. You approve each entry the first time round.
With a full Xero connection, Claude can scan the period before a return goes in for transactions coded to an unusual GST rate, expenses without receipts and entertainment that has not been split. It flags; a person decides and files.
P&L, balance sheet and aged receivables pulled for the period with a first draft of the commentary written, in your practice's format. The review becomes editing, not writing.
Xero's connector asks you to choose one organisation when you connect. For practices, we have built a read-only connector that works across several Xero organisations in one conversation, including reading the attachments on bills.
Drafting the "we still need these from you" emails, engagement letter updates and year-end checklists from your templates, so the chasing happens on time without a person rewriting the same email.
The workflow we are building for a chartered accounting practice. Their bills already land in Xero with the PDF attached, so nobody should be retyping them.
One connector covers every client file, so adding another organisation is a settings change, not another build.
Real engagements, described without client data. Each one started read-only.
Claude works across every client organisation in one conversation, including the PDFs attached to bills. Line-item entry from those PDFs is being built now against real bills from the practice.
An Australian not-for-profit finance team runs five organisations. We connected Claude to all five and trained the team, so questions like who owes what come straight from live Xero data.
We run the Harkness AI books this way: Claude lines the bank feed up against Xero bills, flags what is missing and drafts it. Everything it creates stays a draft until we approve it.
Write access comes last: limited scopes, and a person approves before anything posts to client books.
Practices and finance teams we have set up, plus the way we run our own books.
Each of Nimba's bookkeepers built a Claude skill with us, and Claude now works across their Xero, SuiteFiles and Karbon.
Claude reads open jobs, clients and notes in Karbon. It can add a note or move a job along, and asks before every change.
A custom read-only connector lets Shakti Mat's team ask finance questions across all of the business's Xero organisations in one conversation.
Read the case studyClaude drafts each Harkness AI invoice in Xero with the client's usual rate, GST treatment and tracking tag, checks for duplicates, and leaves it as a draft.
Free to watch, nothing gated. Each one has a written version too.
Nothing to migrate. These are the tools New Zealand practices run, and the work goes into connecting them properly.
Xero is the easy one: there is an official Claude connector and an open-source Xero MCP server. For practice software without an off-the-shelf connection, we build one, read-only first, so nothing in a client's books changes until you decide it should.
Worth reading next:
We set Claude up for your practice: Xero connected with the right scopes, Skills for your recurring work and your team shown how to use it, read-only first. It starts with a free call.
Last updated 24 September 2026 - added how the bill workflow runs and what we have built for practices and finance teams
