If you are exporting data from Xero into Excel every week to build your management reports, you are doing the most tedious part of reporting manually and unnecessarily. Xero has a direct Power Query connector that pulls your data into Excel automatically. Once it is set up, your reports refresh with one click.
What the Xero Power Query connector does
The Xero connector for Power Query pulls data directly from your Xero account into Excel via the Xero API. You authenticate once, choose the data you want - trial balance, P&L, invoices, bank transactions - and Power Query retrieves it. When you click Refresh in Excel, it pulls the latest data from Xero. No export. No copy-paste. No reformatting. The connection is live and the data is always current to the last refresh.
Setting it up
In Excel, go to Data, then Get Data, then From Other Sources, then From Web. You will use the Xero API endpoint for the data you want. You will need your Xero client credentials from creating a connected app in your Xero developer account, which takes about ten minutes. You authenticate with OAuth, which opens a browser window for you to log into Xero and authorise the connection. Once authenticated, the connection is saved.
What data you can pull
The Xero API exposes most of what you need for management reporting. Trial balance data for your P&L and balance sheet. Invoice data including status, so you can see outstanding debtors. Bank transaction data for cash flow reporting. Contact data if you need client-level reporting. Budget data if you have budgets set up in Xero. The data comes through in JSON format which Power Query handles automatically.
Building the report on top of the connection
Once the data is in Power Query, you transform it into the shape your report needs. Pivot tables, calculated columns, aggregations. The transformation steps run automatically every time you refresh. The report itself is built once and populates from the transformed data. Your weekly management report becomes a single click on Refresh followed by distributing the file.
When Power BI makes more sense
Power Query in Excel is the right solution when you want the output in Excel format or when the report is relatively simple. When you want a live dashboard accessible to multiple people without them needing to refresh a file, or when you are combining Xero with other data sources, Power BI with the Xero connector is the better choice. The Xero connector works identically in both - the difference is the output format and how people access it.
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