Accounting integration

Most small businesses already pay for the software. What they do not have is the software talking to itself, so the same number gets typed into two systems by a person who is being paid to do something else.

What comes out of a session

An accountant in Sydney connected her own Xero organisation, then built an Outlook app that emails her its own reports. The figures stopped being retyped.

A month later she came back with a reconciliation check she had built on her own: the bank transactions out of Xero on one side, a client’s spreadsheet on the other, and a list of what does not match. Three hours of comparing became twenty minutes. That is the shape this usually takes. A session gets the connection working, and the thing that pays for itself turns up afterwards, built by the person who knows what they actually compare.

What it costs

The connection itself is free. You are joining up accounts you already hold, so what you spend is the agent’s time and yours.

What goes wrong

A connection that will not authorise is almost always about scope. Xero refused for the best part of an hour in one session. The cause was that the app was requesting permissions the subscription does not include. Trimming the list fixed it immediately, and nothing in the error message said so.

Automate the report before you automate the action. A payroll run was deliberately left manual. First it emails whenever it does anything; the automation comes after that has been watched working for a month. This is the single most useful habit on this page.

Secrets belong in a file, not in the chat. One went on screen during a live session and had to be revoked inside ten seconds. Assume anything visible on a stream was captured, delete it at the source, and generate another.

What cannot be done

Talking to the Australian Taxation Office directly. It wants a registered digital service provider and a security review, and its portal renders in a way a browser extension cannot read. That thread was ended in the session rather than forced, and it is the honest answer rather than a gap in the tooling.