Can you connect Copilot or Claude to Xero Practice Manager?
Xero's new AI integrations cover your accounting data, not your practice management. Here is what actually connects to Practice Manager today, what a full connection takes, and why the security work comes first.
The short answer
Not off the shelf. Xero's integrations with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Claude, both live since mid 2026, connect your Xero financial data to the tools your team already works in. Xero Practice Manager (XPM) is not part of either, and ChatGPT or any other assistant is in the same position. What stands between any AI tool and your practice data is access to the Practice Manager API. If you want an assistant that can see your jobs, WIP and timesheets, or update them, that is a custom build. It is possible, and Xero does not charge practices for this kind of internal access, but there is a gate most firms have not heard of: an annual security assessment of the practice and the integration. More on that below, because it changes the order you do things in.
What Xero actually announced
Three announcements landed between May and July, and they are easy to blur together.
The Claude integration, live since May, lets you connect your Xero organisation to Anthropic's tools and ask plain English questions about profit, cash and invoices. The Microsoft 365 integration followed in July, putting JAX, Xero's AI agent, inside Copilot, where your team can ask financial questions in Copilot Chat and pull live Xero data into Excel as structured tables. XeroForce, announced at Xerocon London a week later, is a natural language agent builder. Xero describes it as letting accountants and small businesses “use simple prompts to build custom AI agents that connect Xero to the third-party apps they already use”, without writing code.
Read the announcements closely and one name never appears: Practice Manager. All three are described as working with your Xero financial data. The system that runs your practice, the jobs, tasks, WIP, timesheets and client workflow in XPM, is not mentioned. That may change, and we would expect it to eventually. For now, firms asking “does this mean Copilot can see our jobs” are asking the right question, and the answer is no.
What you can connect to XPM today
The off-the-shelf options for XPM are data-out only, and they are genuinely useful for the most common request we hear, which is WIP and job reporting without manual exports.
Sync platforms such as SyncHub can pull your XPM data into a reporting database on a schedule, and your team can then query that database from Power BI or Excel. Purpose-built tools go further. Dashboard Insights, named AU Practice App of the Year at the Xero App Awards 2025, provides WIP, job status, profitability and utilisation dashboards out of the box.
What none of these can do is write anything back. An AI assistant sitting on synced data can tell you which jobs look stale, but it cannot update them. Someone still keys the change into XPM by hand, and for more than one firm we have spoken to, that is precisely the manual step they want gone.
What a full connection takes
Writing back into XPM means direct access to the Practice Manager API, and three facts about that path are not widely known.
The gate is a cyber assessment
We have read the assessment. Xero describes it as 21 questions across nine sections, and it is not really a questionnaire about your app. It is a questionnaire about your security posture.
It asks whether multi-factor authentication (MFA) or single sign-on is enforced for every user connected to the integration. Whether data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and in which country it is hosted. Whether your servers follow a recognised hardening standard. Whether you scan for vulnerabilities, and whether the high and critical findings actually got fixed. Whether your audit logs are retained, protected and immutable. It even asks for your security incidents over the past three years and whether the root causes were resolved.
If that list sounds familiar, it should. It is substantially the same ground the Essential Eight and SMB1001 cover, asked by a software vendor instead of a regulator or an insurer. In our experience most firms discover this in the wrong order. They get excited about what an AI assistant could do with their practice data, then find the prerequisite is the security uplift they had been putting off. The security work is the entry ticket to the AI work.
What we have learned building one
We are building an XPM connection in our own lab, because our accounting clients keep asking the same questions in the same words, sometimes in the same week. Two things have surprised us, and neither was the AI.
The first is the shape of the API itself. XPM has no webhooks, so nothing tells you when data changes. Most queries filter on the date a record was created, not when it last changed, and list queries are capped at one-year ranges. There is no feed of deletions for jobs or time entries. None of this is a blocker, but it means a reliable sync is a piece of engineering, not a checkbox.
The second is that the timeline is set by Xero's approval process rather than by the build. Access arrives only after the assessment is passed, so the foundations conversation belongs at the start of the project. If a quote for this work does not mention Xero's security assessment, it has been written by someone who has not read the requirements.
One design position from our own build is worth stating, because it answers the risk question every principal should ask. An assistant that writes into your practice system should never do it silently. Every change should be applied under a named staff member's identity and approved by a person before it lands, so when a job status or a time entry is wrong, the answer to “who did that” is never “the AI”. If a proposal you are given does not address that, keep asking until it does.
Where a firm should start
Not with the connector. Start with the two questions Xero's assessment will ask anyway: is MFA or single sign-on enforced for everyone, and can you account for where your data lives. If your practice is already working towards Essential Eight alignment or SMB1001 certification, you are most of the way through the entry requirements before the AI conversation begins. If it is not, the same gaps will surface in Xero's assessment.
Then pick the job you actually want done. WIP visibility might not need a connector at all. Killing manual status entry does. The right build depends on which of those you are solving, and it is a much smaller conversation once the foundations are settled.
It is fair to wonder whether Xero will simply ship this itself one day. It may. That changes the maths less than it seems, because the foundations keep their value either way. The security uplift is required by insurers, by certification and by Xero's own gate regardless of who builds the connector, and a reporting database you own is not tied to any one vendor's roadmap.
If a connection like this would matter to your firm, tell us. We are building once and deploying per practice rather than starting from scratch each time, and what firms ask for shapes what gets built first.
