Xero MCP: 133 tools, and month-end is something you can ask for

The five Xero tools people use most on FloConnector are, in order: list invoices, get an invoice, look up contacts, create an invoice, record a payment. Nobody connects their books to an AI to admire the chart of accounts. They do it to get paid.

Which is why the gaps were so annoying. You could raise the invoice, then not send it. You could see a customer had paid twice, and do nothing with the extra. You could record a remittance that covered a dozen invoices, one payment at a time, which is exactly the tedium you connected an AI to get rid of.

So we went through Xero’s API one area at a time and filled it in. The Xero MCP connector went from 53 tools to 133. Eighty-one are new, one is gone, and nobody had to reconnect anything to get them.

53 to 133, area by area

Here’s where the growth went. Open any area for the tool names, or switch to New to see only what this release added.

Three areas grew the most. Payments went from 3 tools to 14, because recording a payment is one job and getting money to sit in the right place is about six. Projects went from 2 to 13: before, the AI could see that a project existed and not much else. The chart of accounts and settings went from 7 to 20, which is the housekeeping that used to mean logging in to Xero yourself.

If 133 tools sounds like a lot to hand an AI, it would be, if it saw them all at once. It doesn’t, and we’ve written about why more tools can make an agent worse and what we do about it. You also decide which of them each profile gets.

Getting paid, start to finish

This is the run the release was built around: from an approved invoice to knowing who still owes you, without leaving the conversation.

1. Raise it xero_create_invoice

   Already there, and the most-used write on the connector. Draft or approved, on your own account codes and tax rates.

2. Send it xero_email_invoiceNew

   Xero emails it from your own Xero, on your own invoice template. It goes to a real customer, so it's marked as a write and your AI client can ask before it sends.

3. Share the link xero_get_online_invoice_urlNew

   The page your customer views the invoice on, and pays from if you take payments through Xero. It sends nothing, so it's safe to ask for any time.

4. Match what comes in xero_create_batch_payment xero_allocate_overpaymentNew

   A remittance covering twelve invoices becomes one payment and one bank line. Money paid twice goes against the next invoice.

5. See who still owes xero_get_aged_receivables_reportNew

   Xero's own ageing for a customer, in the same buckets your accountant sees.

The batch payment is the one I’d point at first. Twelve separate payments never matched the single deposit on your bank statement. One batch does.

The rest of getting paid is money that arrives in the wrong shape. It sits in Xero as credit on the customer’s account until somebody applies it, and applying it is now one ask:

• Overpayments. Put what they paid twice against their next invoice.
• Prepayments. Apply a deposit to the invoice it was for, once that invoice exists.
• Credit notes. Set a credit note against the invoice it relates to, or take it back off if it went on the wrong one.

It can also list your repeating invoices, set up a new one and stop one.

The reports someone opens at month-end

Before this release the connector could read three reports: profit and loss, balance sheet and trial balance. Now it also reads:

• Executive summary. Xero’s one-month health check: cash, profitability, the balance sheet headlines.
• Bank summary. Opening balance, money in, money out and closing balance for every bank account, over any dates.
• Aged receivables and aged payables. What one customer owes you, or what you owe one supplier, by how overdue it is.
• Budgets and budget summary. Every budget in the organisation, and what was budgeted by account and period.
• Published tax returns. The GST and activity statement returns already published in Xero, line by line. It reads what was published; it doesn’t prepare a new return.

One limit, and it’s Xero’s: the aged receivables report only comes one customer at a time. For everyone at once, the AI ages your unpaid invoices itself and gets to the same answer by a different road.

Housekeeping that used to mean logging in

Unglamorous, and where a lot of the time goes. It can now:

• Change the chart of accounts. Add an account, rename one, archive one that has done its job, delete one that was never used. Xero only deletes an account with no transactions; anything else gets archived.
• Set up tracking. A tracking category for each region or department, and the options inside it.
• Manage tax rates. Create a custom rate, change one, retire one.
• Group contacts. Put customers in groups and take them out again.
• Keep items current. Change prices and descriptions, and delete what you no longer sell.

It can also look up the currencies you’ve turned on, who has access to Xero, your invoice templates and whether automatic reminders are on. Accounts and tax rates change the books for everybody, so the tool descriptions tell the AI to check with you before it touches either.

Projects, fixed assets and files

Xero isn’t one API, it’s several, and the connector used to stop at the edge of the main one. It now reaches into three more:

• Projects. Create a project for a customer with an estimate and a deadline, add tasks that bill by the hour, at a fixed price or not at all, log time, and see where each task sits against its estimate.
• Fixed assets. Add an asset to the register as a draft, with its depreciation settings. You register it in Xero.
• Files. Xero’s own document library. Upload a file, find one, rename or move it, link it to the invoice or bill it belongs to, and get the Inbox address that emailed receipts land in. Uploads travel through the chat, so they suit a receipt, not a 40-page PDF.

It can show its working

Every record in Xero keeps a history: who created it, edited it, approved it, emailed it, paid it, and when. The AI can now read that.

It can also write to that history. When it applies a credit or changes a record, ask it to leave a note saying what it did and why, and the next person to open the invoice in Xero isn’t left guessing. Notes stay inside your organisation; customers never see them.

Why none of this needed a reconnect

This is the part I’m quietly most pleased with.

Xero is in the middle of changing how apps ask for access. It used to hand out a few broad permissions, one covering all your transactions and one covering every report. It’s splitting those into narrow ones, one per area. Apps created since 2 March 2026 can only use the narrow ones, and older apps have until September 2027 to move over, which means everyone connected to them signing in again.

Every Xero connection on FloConnector is already on the narrow ones, and that paid off twice. Xero’s September 2027 cutover won’t touch your connection, because it’s already on the new permissions. And when we sat down to build these 81 tools, every one of them ran on a permission your connection already held. Nothing new to approve meant nothing to reconnect.

New tools on an existing connection switch on by themselves. If you’ve cut a profile down to a handful of Xero tools, open it and check the new ones are set the way you want.

Payroll is the exception, and it’s why payroll isn’t in this release. It needs permissions no connection has been asked for yet, which means a reconnect, and we’d rather ship that on its own than slip a sign-in prompt into an update that otherwise needed nothing from you.

What’s not here, and the one we removed

xero_list_journals is gone. Xero reserves its Journals endpoint for apps on its premium developer tiers, behind a security assessment and a use-case review, and won’t grant our app the permission it needs. The tool could never have worked, and it never once did for a customer. A tool that always fails costs you a call and an answer that sounds confused, so it’s out. Manual journals are unaffected.

A few more things worth knowing before you ask for them:

• Repeating invoices can’t be edited through Xero’s API, only created, read and deleted.
• Bank transfers can be created here but not edited or deleted. A wrong one gets fixed in Xero.
• Expense claims and receipts sit on an endpoint Xero has deprecated, so we didn’t build on it.
• PDFs come back as their details, not as a document the AI can read. Images and text files it reads directly.

Of the 81 new tools, 43 can change something in Xero, and 21 of those delete something, move money, email a customer or change the books for everyone. Every write is marked as a write to your AI client, so you can require approval before any of them run, or leave them off a profile entirely. Your Xero login never goes near the AI either; that’s how the credentials work across every connector we run.

Every new tool was run against a live Xero organisation through the MCP, the same way your AI calls it, before it shipped. The most useful find wasn’t a broken tool. Xero answers almost every rejected write with “A validation exception occurred” and buries the real reason further down the response. The connector used to pass on the sentence; now your AI gets the reason, which is the difference between being told it failed and being told which field to fix.

How to connect Xero to Claude

Xero is a premium connector, included on the Pro and Scale plans at no extra charge. Connecting it takes about a minute:

The full walkthrough, including the Claude side of it, is in how to connect Xero to Claude.

Already connected? There’s nothing to do. The new tools are already on.

Common questions

Do I need to reconnect Xero to get the new tools? No. Every one of them runs on a permission your connection already holds.

Does it work with ChatGPT and other clients? Your Xero MCP endpoint is a standard remote MCP server, so it works with any client that supports custom connectors. If the term is new to you, here’s a plain-English explainer.

Is this an official Xero app? No. FloConnector is an independent connector built on Xero’s public API. Xero is a trademark of Xero Limited.

133 tools, and most of the new ones are about the part that comes after the invoice.

Written by

David List

Founder, FloConnector

Building the hosted MCP layer that lets a business's AI actually run its software. Previously deep in field-service and accounting integrations.

floconnector.com