Xero Integration Blueprint
A complete design for your Xero API integration, before your team writes a line of code.
Is your team building a custom Xero integration? Do you want to get it right the first time, without wasting time and money on rework?
Our Xero API Integration Blueprint is a tailored design for building a reliable custom Xero integration. It includes specific guidance for your requirements and environment. It also includes all the best practices we developed from years of building and maintaining Xero integrations.
It includes topics such as authentication, query optimisation, incremental vs bulk data ingest, handling rate limits and errors, and a list of best practices to ensure your Xero integration is reliable.
The blueprint is delivered within 10 business days, for a fixed price, for any programming language.
Who is this for?
Any development team who is building a custom Xero integration and wants to get it right the first time.
The Xero API is documented thoroughly, but there’s no guide that tells you how to build a high quality, reliable integration with it. Especially with the new paid API tiers, it’s important to use the Xero API efficiently to keep costs down.
What’s included?
An integration design document written for your requirements and environment. It covers:
- Xero setup for your administrator: creating the app, choosing the right scopes, and handing credentials over securely
- Which OAuth approach fits your situation and why, with setup instructions for your environment
- Token storage and lifecycle, including secure credential storage and secret rotation
- How to query each data type you need, with sample API calls and server-side filtering
- Efficiently ingesting data from Xero, including incremental and bulk approaches
- Reliably writing data to Xero, including idempotency and validation error handling
- API client pseudocode your developers can implement directly in your language
- Architectural advice with regard to how the integration fits with your application
- Best practices around: tenant selection, retries, rate limit handling, date handling, and error handling for common Xero API issues
- A testing and verification checklist, including how to exercise each path against the Xero demo company before going live
The document is delivered as a shared Google Doc within 10 business days of the kickoff call.
Document review call
Once the document is delivered, we’ll have a call to review it with your team. We go through the design and answer any questions about how to implement it in your environment. This is a chance to clarify any points and make sure your team understands the blueprint before they start building.
30 days of support included
Following the review call, we provide a 30 day support period to make sure you can receive advice and clarifications as issues come up during your build.
Support includes:
- Answering questions about the blueprint and your integration approach
- Slack or email access to us with a one business day response time
- Up to two video calls
To get full value from this, start the engagement when your developers have the availability to begin building within that 30-day window.
How it works
- Book a call.
- On the initial call, we’ll find out about your integration requirements and confirm the blueprint fits what you’re building.
- If it’s a good fit, we’ll send an invoice and schedule a kickoff call.
- On the kickoff call, we’ll confirm more detailed requirements, environment details, and how we’ll work together.
- We’ll send you the blueprint within 10 business days.
- Once you’ve had a chance to review it, we’ll schedule a call to go through it with your team.
- Your integration design is ready for building, with 30 days of support from us.
Price
$3,500 AUD ex GST
FAQ
It depends on whether your integration is for a single organisation or many, and where it runs. For most single-organisation integrations, the standard authorisation code flow with a stored refresh token is right, but the details of token storage and refresh are where implementations go wrong. The blueprint specifies the flow for your situation and exactly how to handle the token lifecycle in your environment.
For most transactional data types, voiding or deleting a record updates its modified timestamp, so it shows up in your next incremental sync (using If-Modified-Since) with a status of VOIDED or DELETED. Your sync needs to treat those statuses as tombstones and update or remove the record in your own data store, rather than only handling new and changed records. Some data types are removed without leaving a tombstone, and those need a periodic reconciliation pass instead. The blueprint specifies and verifies the detection approach for each data type you’re ingesting.
Xero enforces per-minute, per-day, and concurrent request limits per tenant, plus an app-wide minute limit. Your integration ideally needs to avoid these limits or intelligently handle throttled responses. The blueprint includes a bulk ingest design that stays within the limits and degrades sensibly when it hits them.
Yes. The design is language-agnostic and the pseudocode is written to be implemented in whatever your team uses. The environment-specific parts, like token storage and background processing, are written taking your environment into account.
That’s fine, and it’s common. The kickoff call covers what you’ve built so far, and the blueprint addresses the gaps and any parts worth reworking before they cause problems.
Yes, but that’s a separate engagement with its own scope and pricing. The blueprint works as the design phase for it. Book a call and we’ll work out which path fits.
Ready to start?
Book a call and we’ll confirm the blueprint fits what you’re building.