Xero without the fear

You'll finish with: Straight answers out of your books, without touching them.

Accounting is the highest-value connector and the one people are most nervous about. Rightly — so here's the version that's actually true.

The good news, and it's bigger than it sounds. The Xero connector is read-only. Claude can look at your books and answer questions about them. It cannot create an invoice, edit one, post a transaction, or change anything at all. The thing everyone is nervous about is not on the table.

What it's actually for

All things you currently open Xero and click around for. That is the whole product, and it is worth more than it looks — most people spend more time looking things up in their accounting system than changing anything in it.

The loop that actually exists

1. You ask"What have we billed the Henderson job so far?"
2. It readsYour live Xero data. Read-only.
3. It answersWith the figures, and a link back into Xero
4. You actIn Xero, by hand, as you always have

Drafting the invoice itself

Claude can still do the thinking part — it just can't put it in Xero. Ask it to work out the line items from your job file and your offers.md rate, and it will hand you the numbers. You type them into Xero.

That sounds like a downgrade. It is also the gate the last chapter told you to build, except you don't have to build it: there is no path by which Claude sends an invoice to a client, because there is no path by which Claude touches an invoice at all.

Plain English

Read-only means exactly what it says — Claude can look, and cannot change. When you connect Xero it asks for permission to read your data and nothing else. If you ever see a Claude connector asking for write access to your accounting system, stop and read the permission screen properly before you agree.

Do this now
  1. Connect Xero. Read the permission screen on the way through — it should be asking to read, not to change.
  2. Spend a week only asking questions. The four above are a good start.
  3. Check three answers against what Xero actually shows. Write down anything it got wrong.
  4. Ask it to work out the line items for one job you'd otherwise price by hand, and compare with what you'd have typed.
How to know it worked

You ask something you'd normally open Xero to find, and the number matches. The line items it works out for a job match the rate in your offers file.

If the rate is invented rather than taken from your offers file, offers.md isn't being read — go back to Foundations chapter 04. And if you were expecting a draft invoice to appear in Xero: it won't, and no prompt will make it. That's the connector, not you.

That's the course

Reading everywhere, writing gated — and in accounting's case, gated by the connector itself. Check what each of your connectors can actually change before you plan a workflow around it.

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