Paymo Xero Integration Guide [2026 Updated]

You’re tracking time and managing projects in Paymo to ensure your team is productive and clients are billed accurately. You're also using Xero to manage your company's books, send official invoices, and reconcile accounts. The problem is the gap between them. Manually copying time logs, expense details, and client information from one system to the other is tedious, time-consuming, and a perfect recipe for errors. This guide will provide a complete, step-by-step walkthrough for connecting Paymo and Xero, helping you automate your financial workflows and get back to focusing on your business.

Why Connect Paymo and Xero in the First Place?

Before jumping into the "how," it's worth understanding the "why." Separating your project management from your accounting software creates informational silos. Your project managers have detailed operational data in Paymo, while your finance team has the financial truth in Xero, but neither side gets the full picture without tedious manual work. Connecting them solves several key business problems.

• Eliminate Duplicate Data Entry: Stop manually re-creating invoices in Xero that are already outlined in Paymo. Stop entering employee expenses into two different systems. An integration automates this transfer, saving hours of administrative work each month.
• Improve Invoicing Accuracy and Speed: Pull billable hours directly from Paymo time entries into Xero sales invoices. This reduces the risk of under-billing or over-billing clients due to manual calculation errors and speeds up your entire billing cycle.
• Gain Real-Time Visibility into Project Profitability: When billable hours and project-related expenses flow from Paymo to Xero automatically, you can more easily analyze the true profitability of each project right from your accounting software.
• Streamline Expense Management: When an employee logs a reimbursable expense in Paymo for a client project, the integration can automatically create a corresponding bill in Xero, ready for payment and allocation to the correct project account.

The Straight Answer: How the Paymo-Xero Integration Works

Let's get straight to the most important point: as of 2026, Paymo does not offer a direct, built-in integration with Xero. This means you cannot simply go into the settings of either app, click a "Connect" button, and have them talk to each other natively.

While that might sound like a roadblock, it’s a common scenario for many software pairings. The solution is to use a third-party automation platform. These services act as a bridge, listening for activity in one application and triggering a corresponding action in another. They provide a "no-code" way to build the exact connection you need.

The most widely used and effective tool for this job is Zapier. It connects to thousands of applications, including robust integrations with both Paymo and Xero. For more complex, multi-step workflows, a powerful alternative is Make (formerly known as Integromat). This guide will focus primarily on Zapier, as it offers a user-friendly starting point for building the most common workflows.

Step-by-Step Guide: Connecting Paymo to Xero Using Zapier

Building a connection with Zapier is like creating a simple set of instructions: "When this happens in Paymo, do that in Xero." Zapier calls these automated workflows "Zaps." Let’s build a common one: creating a sales invoice in Xero whenever an invoice is created in Paymo.

Before You Begin: Prerequisites

To get started, make sure you have the following ready:

• An active Paymo account with administrative permissions.
• An active Xero account with standard or advisor user permissions.
• A Zapier account. You can start with their free plan, which allows for a limited number of single-step Zaps and tasks per month. More complex workflows or higher volume will require a paid plan.

Building Your First "Zap"

A Zap consists of two main parts: a "trigger" (the event that starts the automation) and an "action" (the event that gets performed as a result). Here’s how to set one up.

Step 1: Set Up the Paymo Trigger

First, you need to tell Zapier what to watch for in Paymo.

1. Log in to your Zapier account and click "Create Zap."
2. Search for and select Paymo as your trigger app.
3. Under "Event," you’ll see a list of possible triggers. Common options include "New Invoice," "New Time Entry," "New Expense," or "New Project." For this example, select New Invoice.
4. Click "Continue." Zapier will now prompt you to connect your Paymo account. You will likely need to provide an API key, which you can find in your Paymo account settings under "Your Settings" > "App Passwords."
5. Once connected, Zapier will attempt to find a sample invoice from your Paymo account to use for testing. This ensures the connection is working correctly. Review the sample data and click "Continue."

Step 2: Configure the Xero Action

Now that Zapier knows what to watch for, you need to tell it what to do in Xero.

1. In the "Action" step, search for and select Xero.
2. Under "Event," choose the action you want to correspond with your trigger. Since our trigger is "New Invoice," a logical action would be Create Sales Invoice. Other popular actions include "Create Bill" or "Create or Update Contact."
3. Click "Continue" and connect your Xero account. You will be redirected to the Xero login page to authorize Zapier’s access.

Step 3: Map the Data Fields

This is the most critical part of the process. You are now telling Zapier exactly how to populate the fields in a new Xero invoice using the information from the Paymo invoice it found in the trigger step.

Zapier will show you all the available fields for a Xero invoice. You need to map data from the Paymo trigger to the appropriate Xero field. It looks like this:

• Contact Name: Click into the field and select the Client Name from the Paymo data. Zapier will help find an existing contact or create a new one.
• Email Address: Map the Client Email from Paymo.
• Date: Select the Invoice Issue Date from Paymo.
• Due Date: Map the Invoice Due Date from Paymo.
• Invoice Number: Select the Invoice Number from Paymo.
• Invoice Status: It’s best practice to set this to Draft. This gives you a chance to review the invoice in Xero before it's officially submitted or sent to the client.
• Line Items: This is a crucial mapping. You'll need to map the Line Item Description, Quantity, and Unit Price from Paymo to the corresponding fields in Xero. You'll also need to select the appropriate Sales Account from your Xero chart of accounts.

Take your time with this step. Correctly mapping these fields ensures the integrity of your accounting data.

Step 4: Test and Activate Your Zap

Once you’ve mapped all the necessary fields, Zapier will ask if you want to test the action. Click Test & Continue. Zapier will send the sample data from your Paymo invoice over to Xero and attempt to create a draft invoice.

Hop over to your Xero account and check the draft invoices. If you see the new invoice populated with the correct information, your test was a success! You can now go back to Zapier and click Publish Zap to turn it on.

Common Workflows to Automate Between Paymo and Xero

Beyond creating invoices, here are a few other highly valuable workflows you can build:

1. Syncing Expenses for Client Billing and Bookkeeping

• Trigger: New Expense in Paymo added to a specific client/project.
• Action: Create a new Bill in Xero. You can map the Paymo expense amount to the bill's total, the description to the description field, and even attach the vendor name. This is great for tracking project costs that need to be passed on to the client.

2. Keeping Client Contacts Synchronized

• Trigger: New Client created in Paymo.
• Action: Create or Update Contact in Xero. This two-step action checks if the contact already exists in Xero based on their email. If not, it creates a new one. If so, it can update their details. This keeps your client lists perfectly aligned.

Troubleshooting Common Integration Issues

Even with a tool like Zapier, integrations can sometimes hit a snag. Here are solutions to the most common problems:

• Problem: My Zap isn’t triggering.
  Solution: First, check your Zap history in Zapier for any logged errors. Second, ensure your Zap is turned on. Finally, some Paymo triggers are "polling," meaning Zapier checks for new data every few minutes, not instantly. It might just be a short delay.
• Problem: Data is mismatched or showing up in the wrong fields.
  Solution: This almost always comes down to an error in the "Map the Data Fields" step. Go back and edit your Zap, carefully reviewing each mapped field. Make sure a date from Paymo is going into a date field in Xero and that numbers and text are similarly aligned.
• Problem: I reconnected an app, and now my Zap has an authentication error.
  Solution: If you change your password in either Paymo or Xero, you'll need to reconnect the app within Zapier. Go to the "My Apps" section in your Zapier account, find the app, and click the "Reconnect" button.

Final Thoughts

Connecting Paymo and Xero is essential for any service-based business looking to improve its operational efficiency. Although a native integration is not available, using an automation platform like Zapier provides a flexible and powerful way to bridge the gap. By investing a small amount of time to set up these workflows, you can eliminate hours of manual data entry, reduce costly errors, and gain a clearer, more timely view of your project finances.

This kind of automation ensures your financial and project data are consistently in sync. Of course, managing client data across systems can often bring up tricky tax questions—about revenue recognition rules, the deductibility of specific project expenses, or multi-state tax compliance for remote services. For those moments, having an instant, reliable research tool is critical. Our AI tax research assistant, Feather AI, gives you citation-backed answers from authoritative IRS and state sources in seconds, letting you advise your clients and manage your own books with confidence.