Xero is cloud accounting for small businesses, based in Wellington, New Zealand. It reported 4.92 million customers for the year to March 2026, a count that now includes Melio, the US payments business it bought in 2025.
Around 250,000 accountants and bookkeepers work in it, so whoever does your year-end probably knows it already. No plan charges per user.
Reconciliation, and 1,000 apps
Bank reconciliation gets the most praise, followed by onboarding, and Xero’s Trustpilot rating is 4.1 across more than 11,000 reviews.
Over 1,000 apps plug into it for payroll, payments, stock and selling online, so Xero rarely has to do everything itself.
Plans and scale
Entry plans include 20 invoices a month, and multi-currency comes with the higher plans. Xero’s own guidance says it’s designed for up to roughly 5,000 invoices a month and 4,000 tracked stock items.
The API in 2026
Xero’s API is predictable to build on, and its developer documentation is open to anyone.
Sixty a minute
Each connected business gets 60 API calls a minute and 5,000 a day, or 1,000 on Xero’s free developer tier. Keeping up with new invoices fits inside that easily.
Catching up on history takes longer. Pulling every purchase order a business has ever raised, attachments and all, takes a while at 60 a minute, so an integration that needs the history usually pulls it once at the start and only fetches new records after that.
Webhooks for invoices and contacts
Xero can alert another system when an invoice or a contact changes, plus a few related records. Other records, like payments and purchase orders, are read on a schedule.
New rules in 2026
Since March 2026, Xero charges app developers by tier, based on how many businesses connect and how much data they download, replacing the revenue share it took before. A private integration for a single business (a Custom Connection) sits outside those tiers, with its own monthly fee.
Its developer terms, updated in December 2025, also forbid using API data “to train or fine tune any artificial intelligence models”. The rule is about training. Read it in full before any AI project touches Xero data.
Xero’s changelog lists API changes as they ship.
Evidence for lost parcels
We built a Royal Mail claims system for a seller losing about 16 parcels a week. Every claim needed the purchase order proving what each item cost, many of them supplier scans stored in Xero, so we pull every purchase order out through the API, turn the scans into line items with an AI parsing layer and match them to the Linnworks catalog. Support types in an order ID and gets the evidence back as a zip file about ten seconds later.
A claim that took 20 minutes now takes about two, roughly 240 hours a year back for the support team. One old supplier’s paperwork, with no barcodes and names that matched nothing, had to be left out, which is the kind of thing worth knowing before any AI project starts. What AI-ready actually means for a small business covers the rest of that groundwork.